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GEORGE MOORE 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

THE LIVING CHALICE 

AIDS TO THE IMMORTALITY OF CERTAIN 
PERSONS IN IRELAND 



GEORGE MOORE 



BY 

SUSAN L. MITCHELL 



NEW YORK 

DODD, MEAD & CO. 

1916 



*(* 



^f^v 



/ /7 



TO 

".E" AND JOHN EGLINTON 

WHO ALONE WERE TREATED MERCIFULLY 

BY THE AUTHOR OF "AVE, SALVE AND VALE 

AND WHO ARE THEREFORE NOT LIKELY 

TO BE INDIGNANT AT THE ASSOCIATION OF 

THEIR NAMES WITH THIS STUDY OF 

GEORGE MOORE 



GEORGE MOORE 



George Moore might have cried with Walt 
Whitman : " Do I contradict myself ? Very 
well, I contradict myself. I contain multi- 
tudes." He has paraded before us un- 
abashed, in a multitudinous personality ; 
ashamed of only one George Moore, the 
little Catholic boy of that name who went 
to confession. Yet why should he whose 
whole life has been spent in making con- 
fessions object to confession ? Perhaps it 
was the privacy of the confessional that 
affronted him, that so much good copy 
should be wasted, poured into the ears of 
unliterary priests, whose lips were sealed 
and unable to retail all that valuable 
material. Of course as a literary man he 
would deny the Catholic George Moore, and 
as I do not desire to wound him I will not 
refer any more to this child who was so 
likely a father to the man we know ; no 
need to when we have Moore the pagan, 
Moore the Protestant, Moore the artist, 
Moore the realist, Moore the stylist, Moore 



GEORGE MOORE 



the patriot, Moore the anti-Irishman, Moore 
the dramatist : all personalities which he 
himself has revealed to us in the most en- 
chanting fiction. I will come to each of 
these personalities in turn, but I shall begin 
with the only one of which he himself is not 
the creator, the George Moore, minted in 
Mayo, stamped somewhere towards the 
middle of the last century with an unmis- 
takable Irish birthright which he has never 
been able to obliterate. 

I have had great difficulty in collecting 
any facts about this George Moore, prin- 
cipally because the Celt is averse from facts, 
and when I enquired certain things of those 
who knew him intimately, I was swept off 
my feet by a torrent of opinions. Mr. Moore 
has always been a troubler of the waters of 
opinion. Even in the matter of his age the 
records do not help us. Doubtless the gods 
who predestined him to immortality saw to 
it that his beginnings were shrouded from 
the measurements of time. Computing by 
the light of mere mortality, we find recorded 
in " Who's Who " that his first published 
work, " Poems of Passion," appeared in 
1878. As he must at least have known how 
to read when these appeared, there is some- 
thing to be said for dating his birth from 
the early fifties, and we will proceed on that 
assumption. 

George Moore, then, was born perhaps in 
10 



GEORGE MOORE 



1852, the eldest son of George Henry Moore, 
of Moore Hall, in the county of Mayo, in 
the province of Connaught in Ireland. 
George Henry Moore was a distinguished 
Irishman, and his life has been ably written 
by his son. Colonel Maurice Moore. He 
might be said to have been the founder of 
the Independent Party in Irish politics, 
but his political intelligence undoubtedly 
did not descend to his son George. 

George Moore, who describes with such 
fidelity of detail the personal appearance of 
the characters in his novels, should delight 
in seeing himself portrayed by another 
artist, and as this chapter purports to deal 
with the outer George Moore, I will recall my 
own first impressions. It was my lot to be 
living in London when what calls itself the 
Irish revival was surging there, for we must 
not forget that London was the source of 
that upsetting wave which draggled all our 
crisp young feathers. To me, shortsighted 
from my obscurity in midland Ireland, the 
greatness of London was not in its literary 
persons but in the city itself. It submerged 
me, and I instinctively raised myself on 
the shoulders nearest me. It was doubtless 
luck for me that these shoulders belonged 
to such as the Yeats, Martyn, Moore, Lady 
Gregory, Ashe King, but at first I did not 
know my luck. I thought that these people 
were merely ornaments for the drawing- 

11 



GEORGE MOORE 



room ; afterwards I realised they were orna- 
ments for the world. 

I lived with the Yeats in Blenheim Road — 
and what a lovely book I shall write some 
day about that most companionable house- 
hold. 

To me the persons I met there were not 
at first either intellects or notabilities, they 
were mere society. After a little — being of 
a mind with our old friend Prince Arthur of 
the Tennysonian idyll — I "needs must love 
the highest " when I saw it, I recognised 
them and all their company for what they 
were. So it came to pass that though of 
small account myself, and not now even in 
the memory of most of these — I was free of 
a great company, and my mind, a little 
overawed by W. B. Yeats, Martyn and 
Lady Gregory and always inclined to levity, 
fastened itself on a name that seemed to 
give a lightsome mood to whosoever men- 
tioned it, and I grew curious about Moore. 
Yet when at the rehearsal of " Countess 
Cathleen " in some dark by-way of London, 
I was told he was present, I cannot recall 
any form, only an irritation in the dusty 
atmosphere. When next I met George 
Moore it was in my own city Dublin, where 
every brewer pleases and only literature is 
vile, but I, who still trailed some of the 
clouds of reverence that I brought with me 
from London, looked at this man of wicked 

12 



GEORGE MOORE 



books with an excitement that even irre- 
verent DubHn could not damp. It occmTcd 
to me to wonder at what age Satan brands 
his votaries, as they told us in the Sunday- 
school books and as I still believed, because 
Moore, who everyone said was a very wicked 
man, had the rosy face and innocent yellow 
hair of young virtue, kindness was on his 
lips, though his eyes were not quite so kind, 
a little slow in following the lips. I had 
met in London another yellow-haired writer, 
but he was pale and pasty of complexion — 
and Moore was not like Symons. No, he 
was not like Symons ; it counted in his 
favour. George Moore seemed to me then 
to be a man of middle height with an egg- 
shaped face and head, light yellow hair in 
perpetual revolt against the brush, a stout 
nose with thick nostrils, grey-green eyes, 
remarkable eyes, a mouth inclined to pet- 
tishness, lips thick in the middle as if a bee 
had stung them. He had champagne shoul- 
ders and a somewhat thick, ungainly figure, 
but he moved about a room with a grace 
which is not of Dublin drawing-rooms. 
Afterwards, seeing George Moore in the 
street, I found he was the only man in 
Dublin who walked fashionably. The strange 
word suits him ; perhaps he is the last man 
of fashion in these islands. He wore an 
opera hat. Nobody in Dublin wears an 
opera hat, and, when Moore put it like a 

13 



GEORGE MOORE 



crown upon his yellow head or crushed it 
fashionably under his arm, it acted on 
Dublin like an incantation. I remember 
my own instantaneous homage. 

This description I feel to be inadequate, 
and I have summoned to my aid the folk- 
lore of Dublin. Dublin is a crater of epithet, 
and whenever George Moore is mentioned 
out of the crater boil up such phrases as 
" an over-ripe gooseberry," " a great big 
intoxicated baby," " a satyr," " a boiled 
ghost," " a gosling." I am not satisfied 
with these descriptions, they are florid and 
untidy, and all descriptions suffer in com- 
parison with Moore's own perfect etching of 
a portrait. He speaks in the latest of his 
prefaces of his " sloping shoulders and long 
female hands," with the feeling of a true 
artist. True there are painted portraits of 
George Moore. One by Miss Harrison in 
which she has set her own benevolence on 
her sitter's brow and her own candour in 
his eyes. It is not her portrait, however, 
which is most truly symbolic of Moore, but the 
famous portrait by Manet. In my (borrowed) 
copy of " Modern Painting," when I came 
across in the essay on Manet the words " He 
never painted anything that he did not 
make beautiful," I found them underlined 
by some waggish reader with a reference to 
the number of the page on which the repro- 
duction of the Manet portrait appeared ! 

14 



GEORGE MOORE 



That portrait which is Hke nothing so much 
as the human symbol of a high-explosive 
shell. 

George Moore's is a face dear to the 
caricaturist and in itself at times a carica- 
ture : the yellow hair, the fat features, the 
sly smile, the malice, the vanity. But as 
has been said to me, let someone begin to 
discuss an idea and in a moment the con- 
tours change, the fat shapelessness falls 
away, the jaw lengthens, the bones become 
visible, the eyes darken, the brows straighten, 
a hawk-like keenness is in the look. One 
does not caricature this Moore ; it is the 
face of the thinker, the man who handles 
ideas like a master. There is a duality in 
Moore that at once repels and fascinates 
and makes a study of him a delightful 
adventure in characterisation. 

I am not a great reader and rarely read 
critically, but in my skimmings over fiction 
I cannot recall any writer so continuously 
implicated in his own work as George Moore. 
The creative mind, following the highest 
example, leaves its creatures once formed to 
fend for themselves. They are most close 
and cherished, an agony and a delight till 
they have taken shape and started on their 
own lives, then one feels them a part of 
one's self no more, they are separate beings. 
The child sets out to play his part in life. 
That is, perhaps, why the writer who most 

15 



GEORGE MOORE 



lays bare his soul in creation feels so little 
intimacy, so little modesty, when his thought 
confronts him later on the printed page. 
It is no more bone of his bone, but, lord of 
its own body, it has begun to form its own 
ties. 

George Moore does not seem to me to 
create in this fashion. His production is 
more like that of the banyan tree whose 
own branches spring up into trees all round 
it, never detaching themselves from their 
parent, but in their many lives are one tree. 
George in his many books is but one George, 
he never loses sight of any of his selves in 
any of his works, but returns continually 
to write new prefaces to old books, re- 
animating in turn each of his dead memories. 
This is why I find it impossible to write 
of George Moore's works apart from George 
himself. Though I shall do my best as a 
conscientious writer to examine the writings 
severally, I know that I cannot hide from 
him in his banyan grove, he will spring at 
me from behind every one of his own 
saplings ; although as a poet, in which 
character I shall first consider him, he has 
been more successful in concealing himself 
than in any other. 



16 



II 



Mr. Moore, though never a penitent, has 
confessed himself so abundantly in all his 
work that his biographer's task should be 
an easy one. If we examine the matter 
closely, however, we shall see that while 
Rousseau, eminent among confessors, made 
confessions all about himself, Mr. Moore's 
are largely about his friends. As a poet, 
however, Mr. Moore presents few difficulties. 
It is easy to understand how a young man, 
heady with vanity and conscious of some 
literary power, should first seek in verse a 
medium of expression. He himself said 
once : " Every young man of literary talent 
has one volume of poems in him when he is 
young ; the test of a poet is whether he can 
still write poems when he is fifty ! " Judged 
by this his own standard, Mr. Moore is not 
a poet. He published two volumes of 
poetry, " Flowers of Passion " in 1878, and 
" Pagan Poems " in 1881. In neither of 
these is there much more than competent 
versifying. They are wanting in that sin- 
cerity which is in nearly all his prose ; they 
are artful and more than a trifle perverse. 
But for this latter quality they might have 
B 17 



GEORGE MOORE 



been written by any of those beneficed and 
leisured clergymen whose elegantly bound 
volumes of classically flavoured verse are 
in so many eighteenth-century book collec- 
tions. The patient cataloguer knows them 
well, and knowing, yawns. In perhaps only 
two poems of Mr. Moore's, " Ode to a Dead 
Body" and "The Beggar Girl," is there a 
hint of that sympathy which afterwards, 
when he had found his real mode of expres- 
sion as a novelist, made " Esther Waters " 
the best of all his novels. 

Mr. Moore is so interesting to a biographer 
as a human being, as a novelist and as a 
critic, why should I make any bones of dis- 
missing his claims as a poet ? A story I 
have been told of Mr. Moore's boyhood 
makes an appropriate comment on his 
verse. He chose as a treat for his tenth 
birthday to be dressed up to resemble a 
Greek of Syria. With an ornamental sword 
and mounted on a grey pony with Eastern 
trappings he was led around his father's 
demesne to the wonder of the peasants. 
His love of " dressing up " made him write 
verse as it made him study painting. 

It will not surprise anybody who has 
read Mr. Moore's verse to learn that his 
favourite poets are Shelley and Swinburne. 
His two volumes are a whole whispering 
gallery full of echoes. It is amazing to see 
a man who began by so servile an imitation 

18 



GEORGE MOORE 



of other men develop the astonishing origin- 
ahty of " Ave, Salve and Vale." 

As well as these two volumes of poems, 
Mr. Moore collaborated with a friend in 
" Martin Luther," a tragedy in blank verse. 
I have been told that a literary friend in 
Dublin once asked him about " Martin 
Luther." He instantly sprang from his chair 
and clutching his flaxen locks walked fran- 
tically about his room wailing : " What 
have I ever done to you that you should 
remind me of this thing ? " It is so difficult 
to get a copy of this work to-day that I am 
tempted to believe Mr. Moore bought up 
the copies himself and destroyed them. 

Every now and then when he was in 
Dublin Mr. Moore would discover a new 
poet and try him on the stony silence of 
John Eglinton. His faith in Swinburne was 
somewhat shaken by the steady refusal of 
the Irish school of poets to see more in 
him than eloquent emptiness. " Flowers of 
Passion," however, fetches up to £8 from 
collectors, and will continue to go up in 
price no doubt, in spite of this chapter. 



19 



Ill 



Nobody in Irelanti has ever seen any of 
Mr. Moore's paintings except "^," to 
whom he once shyly showed a head, remark- 
ing that it had some " quahty." "^ " 
remained silent. 



20 



IV 

When I come to speak of Mr. Moore as a 
critic I have nothing but my mother wit 
to guide me. As to the intrinsic value of 
his criticism, I have not the knowledge 
which would enable me to gauge it. This 
defect of mine has always been a great 
trouble to me, though Mr. Balfour wrote 
encouraging words to such as I when, after 
profound examination into the question of 
criteria, he decided there were none save 
personal preference. Should I be timid in 
following where so intrepid a thinker has 
led the way ? 

Mr. Moore wrote " Impressions and 
Opinions " in 1890, and " Modern Painting " 
in 1893. To many people these books of 
criticism are by far the most interesting of 
his work. He has a great deal to say about 
writing and painting and he is so interested 
in both these arts that he compels our 
interest. He knows why he likes a painter 
or a writer and he tells us why with all the 
skill of language he possesses. Nobody 
does this quite in Mr. Moore's way, because 
very few people bring such a momentum of 
personality to bear upon their writing. At 

21 



GEORGE MOORE 



the moment I can think of no writer about 
writers to compare him with, except Chester- 
ton, and I am aware that it is an unfair 
comparison and exposes at once the lack in 
Mr. Moore's writing. Mr. Chesterton is 
indeed a shower of star dust rather than a 
star, yet if that shining dust of epigram had 
an organic unity he might be one of the great 
writers of the world. He has been brushed 
by the wing of genius, and Mr. Moore, whose 
altars are never cold — for he has made many 
a burnt offering — has never been able to 
lure the winged ones his way. 

Yet his art as a writer is a genuine art. 
But while his writing about writers is always 
very interesting, his writing about painting 
is a different and a greater thing. I explain 
it to myself this way. He married his art 
as a writer and settled down comfortably 
enough beside her for life, he will never 
leave her, he would be lost without her. 
Painting he loved, but did not marry. It 
was an unrequited love. All the ardour of 
h s youth went out to her. He worked hard 
in her service but she would have none of 
him. All he knows of romance is on that 
side of his nature. This warms us as we 
read his '' Modern Painting." We know as 
he writes about painting that his adoring 
eye is still on the palette which will never 
do his bidding. He loved those colours, he 
knew all they could do for others but they 

22 



GEORGE MOORE 



never glowed for him. Hence every sen- 
tence he writes about pictures he rolls upon 
his tongue, it is a sweet morsel, and he gives 
us with full justice every particle of its 
flavour. That one should smell the paint 
in these sentences is not wonderful. Some- 
one told me that Mr. Moore said he loved 
the smell of oil paint better than the smell 
of flowers. Where one disagrees with Mr. 
Moore's criticism — and who agrees with any- 
one's criticism ? — is perhaps, as has been said 
to me, because he cares more for art than 
nature and for painting than for art. 

" Impressions and Opinions " are very 
much Moore weighted with all his sincere 
and unreasonable personality ; serious and 
reverent as in the Balzac article where he 
helps us to look just for an instant into that 
million - peopled brain ; in the impressions 
of Turgenieff, Verlaine, Zola, the Two 
Unknown Poets, full of as keen a scent for 
literature as the foxhound for the fox. That 
he does not always " kill " is part of the 
charm of our Moore as a critic, he allows 
himself to be deflected from his object as 
in the Zola article by a very deliberate ill- 
temper, and in the Turgenieff article by 
the pettishness that makes him sell his 
Dostoevsky for a foolish epigram. In " Mum- 
mer Worship " he enjoys himself, as we all 
do when dignifying our personal anti- 
pathies by the name of opinions we give 

23 



GEORGE MOORE 



our public " a piece of our mind." The 
articles on " the Salon Julien " and " De- 
gas," the " Rencontre in a Salon,'''' " the 
New Pictures in the National Gallery " 
really should belong to "Modern Painting" 
and are as at home there as Moore himself 
in the company of oil tubes and easels. 

It has been said to me of Mr. Moore that 
he had enough credulity to make him a 
bishop, but that he met Manet before he 
met Christ and that to Manet he has given 
all he knows of worship. However orches- 
trated his art criticism, however various the 
instruments he employs, whatsoever painters 
he writes about, one theme runs through 
all the essays — Manet. One doxology ends 
them all : " Glory be to Manet, to the most 
potent squeezer of the fat oil tube, to the 
last manufacturer of quality in oil painting." 

And one understands it so well. Mr. 
Moore's romantic devotion to painting, his 
long effort to use colour, that real under- 
standing and appreciation of what it could 
do that is most certainly revealed in every 
article he wrote about painting, and his 
pathetic failure to do anything he wanted 
with it 1 No lover ever poured his unre- 
quited love in sonnet with more passion 
than Mr. Moore in these essays has sung his 
unrequited love of oil paint ; this love 
that even affected his politics and made 
him a traitor to the reigning house in 

24 



GEORGE MOORE 



England because they did not possess a 
Manet among them. Manet could do all 
things with paint. What a god ! He calls 
his essays, " Whistler," " Corot," " Ingres," 
"Chavannes," "Millet," "Monet," "De- 
gas " ; he might have called them all 
" Manet," so much do we surmise behind 
all his great archetype. His " Modern 
Painting," with its many essays, sings the 
Benedicite Omnia Oyer a of the god Manet. 

One suspects that he did not jump into 
this worship of Manet all at once, but that 
his love for the unpopular Manet was a 
reaction from a love of some popular painter 
like Dore. His ardour is that of the convert. 
I have been converted and I know. 

That Mr. Moore's art criticism has a 
devastating quality at times is illustrated 
in his " Modern Painting " by the article 
on the Victorian Exhibition. It is not so 
much a consideration of the art as the 
explosion of a mine under it. In conversa- 
tion this devastating quality was happily 
illustrated when he visited a friend who had 
an immense picture by Sargent of three 
ladies seated amid high-class furniture. It 
was hung in the dining-room, but during 
dinner George never lifted his eyes to look 
at it. " You have not looked at my Sargent, 
Mr. Moore," his hostess at last said. " No," 
said George, " I was afraid you would speak 
about it. I don't like it. But I have just 

25 



GEORGE MOORE 



been talking to somebody who saw it at the 
Academy and who admires it tremendously." 
'' Would he like to come here and see it 
again ? " asked his hostess. " No, I don't 
think you would like him to come," said 
Moore. "You see, he is my greengrocer. 
He likes pictures and he talks about them 
to me when I go to pay my bills. ' Oh, Mr. 
Moore,' he said, ' wasn't it a beautiful pic- 
ture ? Here were the young ladies on the 
sofa and you knew the footmen were on 
the stairs handing up the young gentlemen, 
and they were drinking champagne all day 
long. It was real high life.' And that is 
exactly what I think of the picture," con- 
cluded George ; " it's just the greengrocer's 
idea of high life." 

Mr. Moore's genuine love for art was the 
tie that bound him to many strange associ- 
ates ; it was the basis of his love for Shelley, 
his admiration of Yeats and " ^E." It was 
John Eglinton's grace in turning a sentence 
that secured him the friendship of Moore, 
and even in the shearing of Edward Martyn, 
conducted with all the ferocity of a near 
relative, the wind was tempered by Moore's 
respect for Martyn's very real dramatic 
talent. Indeed, so great is Mr. Moore's 
love for art that I believe if when he returned 
to Ireland he had found good stained glass 
in the Catholic churches, and altar pieces 
there by artists he respected, he would have 

26 



GEORGE MOORE 



become an ardent champion of the Catholic 
faith, and Protestantism would never have 
received an adherent so little to her mind, 
and whose hunger for art she also was totally 
unable to satisfy. For I can never believe 
that it was the parish priest's love of a good 
dinner that drove Mr. Moore from that 
fold, such a love is not really alien to Mr. 
Moore's nature and could be no stumbling- 
block to his faith. So desirable and human 
a characteristic might well have won his 
praise, if to the love of a good dinner the 
parish priest had united love for a good 
picture. 



27 



Women, I feel, are only intermittently self- 
conscious and the business of putting to- 
gether the wisdom obtained in these momen- 
tary glimpses of themselves is a troublesome 
one, because they live only occasionally in 
their minds at all. Therefore no woman 
has risen up to write a book containing the 
whole wisdom of woman, and I for one pray 
that such an one may never arise to profane 
our mysteries. For the most part we look 
to men to reveal us to ourselves. Man is 
our logos, articulate on our behalf. Women 
are, I think, curious, prying creatures, seeking 
mind. I can easily explain to myself Mr. 
Moore's ideas about women and why they are 
not so offensive to women as to men. There 
is often a wreckage of women about the 
lives of prominent writers or thinkers or 
any men who stand above their fellows. 
They attract women as the lighthouse at- 
tracts the birds, and the wheeling creatures 
die of exhaustion, unable to reach the light 
and unable to leave it. Mr. Moore, perhaps, 
makes the common error that it was his 
person and not the light they fancied on his 
brow that lured them. Therefore perhaps 

28 



GEORGE MOORE 



he and they are quits. The sexes perhaps 
are always quits, and when Mr. Moore says 
such and such a one was or was not his 
lover, we women are unmoved. We think 
he is rather an idiot to talk so much about 
it, and we can only comprehend vicariously 
and through our sympathy with them the 
tremendous to do men raise over Mr. 
Moore's breach of their convention. We 
make him a present most cheerfully of any 
little pleasure he gets out of fancying we 
are in love with him while we crane eagerly 
over his shoulder to read what he writes 
about us. His main theme in his novels is 
love. What are " Evelyn Innes " and " Sister 
Teresa" but the only novels exclusively 
about love in the language ? Funny person. 
Women know instinctively all he knows 
about love and more also. It is intellect 
we are after. The intellect he brings to 
bear upon love we wash out of his novels as 
carefully as the miner washes the gold from 
the clay. 

In Mr. Moore's continual occupation with 
love and lovers I find him less unpleasant 
than many of the English novelists. There 
is a less adhesive quality in his coarseness, 
and I think it is because he has never been 
able even to simulate passion. His nature is 
strongly biassed in one direction, but his 
intellect has balanced him : there is a cold 
quality in it. Passion would, perhaps, have 

29 



GEORGE MOORE 



spared us his tiresome preoccupation with 
what one might call millinery and confec- 
tionery in the love adventures in his novels. 
But how absurd I am ! Given passion, the 
novels would never have been written. In 
that grotesque character of his where mingles 
much that is noble with much that is base, 
I think that beauty has never had her lamp 
put out. It seems to me that the women in 
Mr. Moore's novels are such as no woman 
would ever draw aside her skirts from. He 
has not created a wholly unpleasant woman, 
and some of his women are delightful beings, 
docile to life, mother-hearted, full of wonder 
and trust, inimitably kind. We can recall 
Alice in ''Muslin," Esther Waters, Kitty 
Hare, Agnes Lahens, Evelyn Innes. We 
are often suspicious that Mr. Moore was by 
nature an amiable and kindly gentleman, 
who ought never to have annoyed anybody, 
but either a false idea of art led him into 
evil courses or a natural impishness of 
temper, which no training could subdue. 
Nature never intended him to write droll 
tales like Balzac. He is not at home in 
them, and, when he does violence to our 
feelings, I suspect he does violence to his 
own. He brazens it out, of course, like the 
nasty little boy who puts out his tongue at 
one, and does it all the more, the more he 
thinks it annoys. Is there a little devil in 
Mr. Moore that makes him want to annoy ? 

30 



GEORGE MOORE 



Most of us owned one in our early days, 
but grown-up obligations made us put the 
chain on him. Mr. Moore has never grown 
up and his little devil is an active little 
beast. 

We expect this impishness in Mr. Moore 
annoys his men more than his women 
readers. There is hardly a naughty boy's 
trick which is new to us women ; we have 
laid the rod in pickle so very often. Mr. 
Bernard Shaw understands women much 
better than Mr. Moore, but we do not like 
our Bernard ; he sees too much with that 
chill grey eye of his. He would be good to 
us in actual life, clothe us and feed us 
and give us good wages, but what woman 
can forgive " Man and Superman " ? Mr. 
Moore in actual life would fly from all that 
was disagreeable in us, unless he could use 
it for literary purposes. It would not be 
agreeable to him to work at social problems 
like Mr. Shaw. But Mr. Moore pleases us 
more than Mr. Shaw. Mr. Moore often 
totally misreads us, but we do not want to 
be read, we want to read ; we do not want 
to be understood, we want to understand. 
And when Mr. Moore adopts, as he so often 
does, the Sultan attitude towards women, 
with its false air of petting and protection, 
we are not offended. We like, even those of 
us who do not wear it, to be told how men 
are subjugated by powder and paint. The 

31 



GEORGE MOORE 



more hardworking we are, the more we love 
to hear of those women whose only labour 
is that they may achieve an instant's beauty. 
Yet women are the sincerest creatures and 
but seldom taken in even by those false 
statements of life that they find so extremely 
comforting. 

Mr. Moore once said that his brother 
Maurice was the only member of his family 
who knew how to behave as a gentleman. 
Well, Mr. Moore is an amazingly truthful 
person, and this commentary upon himself 
is illuminating in view of the liberties which 
in his later books he has taken with his 
friends. He has never had any private 
life himself, and he regards as eccentricity 
the objection his friends have to the private 
lives invented for them by him. In his 
essay on Corot, Mr. Moore tells how once 
he came upon the old man painting in the 
woods. After admiring his work, Mr. Moore 
said to him, "Master, what you are doing 
is very beautiful, but where is it ? " Corot 
flicked his brush in the direction of a clump 
of trees a couple of hundred yards away 
and said " There." Corot was improvising 
from a dim suggestion. He did not want to 
be too close, to lose grip of his subject in a 
mass of details. This story is a parable of 
Mr. Moore and his friends. He did not 
want to see them closely, knowledge of 
detail would have interfered with his pic- 

32 



GEORGE MOORE 



ture. How important it was to him not to 
get too close to his subject, the following 
story illustrates : Last summer returning 
from Kilteragh in Sir Horace Plunkett's car, 
having lunched there and been treated as an 
honoured guest, he seemed penetrated by 
the kindness of Sir Horace. He said to me : 
" Why, Plunkett is a most intelligent man, 
he has a real intellect. I never spoke to 
him before. I never understood ' ^E's ' 
belief in him. ' JE ' was right, he is never 
wrong. Why does Plunkett treat me like 
this after the way I wrote about him ? He 
must be a good man." Then, the first 
generous impulse past, he recurred to what 
really mattered — his writing, and with a sly 
smile said, " How fortunate it was I wrote 
my book before I knew him." Bouvard 
and Pecuchet were already fixed in their 
places, no intimate knowledge had come in 
time to spoil the literary effect. As I write 
this little story with a horrible exactness I 
cannot help feeling what an admirable gem 
of fiction it mig^i' have become in the 
capable hands'orMr. Moore. He would have 
got out of it the whole first volume of a 
novel. 

Mr. Moore is no Rabelais, his Irish nature 
forbids him. He is no French novelist at 
home' in his sins. I once was present at a 
social gathering in Dublin which tried to 
imitate what we have grown to believe — 

C 33 



GEORGE MOORE 



it is probably fiction — was the life of the 
Latin quarter in Paris. There was just one 
person present who was native to that life 
and at home in it, and he was not Irish. 
The others ! My goodness, how funny they 
were ! Dear things, they had never learned 
how to be anything but good, and they 
couldn't learn. They were as awkward as 
dancing bears. Conscience sat on them like 
Sunday clothes, the atmosphere was as 
gloomy as a church heavy with mea culpas. 
They drank pitifully, it was the only road 
they knew to Verlaine. There may have been 
a time in Ireland when your young blood 
could carry his drink "like a gentleman." 
Alas, I never saw it. When your clever 
young Irishman rots his brains with drink, 
they rot, that is all, and the decomposition 
is a horror to fly from. Perhaps the Latin 
races can sin gracefully, the Irish cannot. 
And Mr. Moore's sinning ? He cannot 
escape from his birthright. Lough Cara set 
her seal on him, " islands lying in misted 
water, faint as dreams." As Silenus he is a 
poor thing. His leer is so much " make-up," 
and it is the more revolting because he is 
naturally sincere. He has no genius for the 
gross. It is a creed with him not to be 
ashamed, but here I catch him tripping, 
for he is ashamed of being ashamed. Shame 
would become him well who has so griev- 
ously betrayed himself. When he speaks 

84 



GEORGE MOORE 



in "Memoirs of My Dead Life" of the 
shock he experienced in a ghmpse of his 
" ugly old face," I wish some mirror had 
showed him his ugly old soul 1 He cannot, 
however, entirely obscure his natural kind- 
ness. Many women must have found him a 
good friend. It is an artifice and a peculiarly 
irritating one that makes him so continually 
translate his kindly human feeling into 
terms consistent with his perverse literary 
theory. 



35 



VI 



Though levity is justifiable and even com- 
mendable when one deals with Mr. Moore 
as a poet or a painter, for one does not take 
him seriously in either of these aspects, it 
would be entirely out of place when one 
comes to speak of Mr. Moore as a novelist. 
Personally — ^and I need not apologise for 
personality in an intentionally personal book 
about a very personal writer — all Mr. Moore's 
novels are very distasteful to one who never 
feels quite comfortable or happy when 
obliged to voyage in fiction outside the safe 
harbourage of " The Wide Wide World," or 
" Mansfield Park." I have an ingrained 
propriety of mind that makes me most at 
home in a novel where the young lady 
marries the Rector, who should, if possible, 
be the next heir to a baronetcy ; and where 
all the characters walk daintily in the guarded 
paths of life. But I have been warned 
against the error of confounding my likings 
with my judgment, and while my personal 
self is most unhappy with the Balzacs, the 
Turgenieffs, the Flauberts, the Daudets, the 
Hardys and the Moores, my intellect is 
stimulated by such society. Like most 

36 



GEORGE MOORE 



women, I do not live in my intellect, but 
I derive great benefit from my occasional 
visits there, and when there and in the seat 
of judgment, I allow no personal predilec- 
tion to influence an intellectual decision. 
My intellect, then, having examined all the 
evidence, assigns Mr. Moore his just place 
as a novelist. " Esther Waters " and " The 
Mummer's Wife" are masterpieces of the 
naturalistic school. With a more varied 
mind than Hardy, Moore has the same sub- 
human insight. It is the uncanny and in- 
stinctive underground knowledge of the 
domestic servant. It has the same minute- 
ness, the same unemotional completeness. 
Had servants an intellectuality commensur- 
ate with this instinct what terrors we should 
experience ! But luckily for us they have 
for the most part a simplicity and warmth 
of nature which turns this sinister instinct 
into an engine for our comfort. While Mr. 
Moore in his ''Ave, Salve and Vale" has 
turned it into an engine for the discomfort 
of his friends, in his other novels he has 
used it with great skill in an examination, 
pathologically minute, of the emotions. The 
ordinary novel reader is very like the 
ordinary theatre goer, both desire a sort of 
after-dinner lounge for the mind. It is 
most distressing to such persons to find 
themselves in a dissecting room where 
humanity is laid upon the table and that 

37 



GEORGE MOORE 



interior life so happily hidden from the 
un-intellectual man is exposed in ail its 
complicated workings. He feels it to be an 
indecency, an outrage, though he may admit 
its value. Dear ordinary person, I am entirely 
with you in my prepossessions and tastes ! 

From the year 1888, when he published 
" A Modern Lover," till to-day when he is 
publishing his " Brook Kerith," Mr. Moore 
has been incessantly busy writing. Natur- 
ally a lazy man, as those who know him 
best assure us, he has compelled himself 
to arduous mental labour. He has deserved 
well of his art, he has propitiated it by the 
sacrifice of many things dear to the ordinary 
man, he has not even withheld his friends. 
He has written unblushingly of many lovers, 
but his art has been his one love all his 
life, and he has been to her the most faithful 
of devotees, and he has had his reward. 
Three of his novels show us very clearly 
what this reward has been. In " The Mum- 
mer's Wife" Mr. Moore obtained power, in 
" Esther Waters " sureness, and in " Ave " 
he found a complete expression of a most 
vivid and original personality. 

Mr. Moore in his " Confessions of a Young 
Man," published in 1888, tells us the story 
of his journeying from Mayo to Mont- 
martre, of his life as an art student in Paris, 
and of his return to London and his self- 
imposed servitude there to the art of writing. 

38 



GEORGE MOORE 



There is little to distinguish his story from 
that of other ardent young men of his day 
or of ours, except the determined publicity 
he gave it. I remember when I was a little 
schoolgirl pulling out a shaky tooth with a 
determination to let no pain deter me, 
because in five or ten minutes I should be 
able to show the tooth to my schoolmates 
and boast of my sufferings. Mr. Moore, 
with as many teeth as a crocodile, has 
pulled them all out in his " Confessions of a 
Young Man," and hasn't spared us a single 
reminiscent pang. This bad boy of English 
literature who does his own birching so per- 
sistently and publicly tells us of his selfish- 
ness, his folly and perverseness in Paris, 
and how he found that painting was un- 
attainable for him, and how he had the 
sense to drop it and make another bid for 
fame. I do not regret his Paris, however, 
when I come to read his novels. How in- 
tolerable his realism would have been on an 
English foundation. If an Irish writer 
must travel, then I think the long way 
round by Paris is the shortest way home for 
him. Synge found it so, and James Stephens 
is travelling that way also. Paris saved 
Mr. Moore from the English idea that the 
novel is meant merely to amuse. In the 
English novels, with a few exceptions, one 
finds no light, no air, they treat of love as 
if it were one of the courses at dinner, a 

39 



GEORGE MOORE 



heavy dinner. Paris also may have saved 
Mr. Moore from building on this foundation 
because it influenced him in his ideas about 
women. However narrow his realism, how- 
ever obsessed by sex, your French novelist 
does not seem to be able to get away from 
the conviction that woman stands for beauty. 
His belief is a fugitive gleam, perhaps, from 
some old pagan memory, flitting here and 
there across his darkness. 

Moore in his " Mummer's Wife " is affected 
by the realists, but his Irish temperament 
saved him from what might easily have de- 
generated into a catalogue of details and the 
use of the observer's notebook. He gradu- 
ally obtained mastery over his materials 
and his art became less a picture of life and 
more and more a manifestation of his own 
temperament. In " The Lake," written in 
1905, for the first time he began to get a 
mastery of his style, long practice had 
brought him to the point where he deserved 
to be called a writer as distinct from a 
story-teller. We begin more and more 
after this book to find happy turns of phrase 
such as that which delights us in " Ave," 
when he speaks of Yeats' attempt at a joke 
being " lost in the folds of his style." " The 
Lake ' ' was written in Ireland. It seems as if it 
was a true instinct that drew him to Ireland, 
his incessant labour for his own making was 
not in vain, his best work was done here. 

40 



VII 

The reviewer, that literary agitator, who 
could not live at all but for the strife he 
stirs up about writers, will say that my 
attempt at a criticism of Mr. Moore's novels 
is an absurdity, he will show me how it 
ought to be done. Even so, that is his 
business. I am attending to mine, which is 
to provide him with things to say. The 
writers will be on my side. They would 
surely rather that their books should be 
treated as living persons, first of all, than 
that I should show sentence by sentence 
how Mr. Moore or another learned to write 
them. This is the reason I provide for my- 
self for choosing some of the most living 
to me of Mr. Moore's novels and showmg 
the effect of their acquaintance on me, 
rather than writing in the usual manner of 
the reviewer of the effect of my acquaint- 
ance on them. Three of the writers who 
have preceded me in this series of " Irish- 
men of To-Day" have approached their 
task somewhat differently. Yet I cannot 
help feeling that Mr. Darrell Figgis, who so 
ostentatiously presents us with a clue to the 
labyrinth of '' ^," is lost in it himself and 

41 



GEORGE MOORE 



can never lead us out. Mr. Hone, one of the 
very few impartial Irish writers, is listless 
about Mr. Yeats, his book has no more blood 
in it than a balance sheet. There is blood in 
Mr. Ervine's "Carson"; he knows nothing 
about Sir Edward Carson, of course, but 
his teeth are firmly fixed in the calf of 
someone's leg, all the time, and he draws 
blood without a doubt. 

Mr. Moore in his preface to " Spring 
Days," published in 1888, says that some 
six years before he had noticed that " an 
artificial and decadent society was repre- 
sented by a restricted and conventional 
literature of no relation with the moment 
of which it chattered." He explains that 
in spite of the great difficulties in his way 
he had written '' A Drama in Muslin " and 
'' A Mere Accident," " scorning all facile 
success and walking to the best of my 
strength in the way of Art." Mr. Moore has 
certainly laboured in his realism in " Spring 
Days," and alas ! we labour in it too. A 
human being will die who is obliged to re- 
breathe the air he exhales and no other, 
and these exhalations of our own lives, the 
realistic novels, are heavy with death to 
the imagination. Yet one cannot but ac- 
knowledge what a painstaking and faithful 
picture " Spring Days " is of our middle- 
class life, where no wild adventure occurs, 
where crises come towards us insidiously 

42 



GEORGE MOORE 



and not in the grand manner with a swoop 
of wings. The nets of convention are about 
us, character develops through a series of 
little pushes this way and that. It is life, 
but life repeated so faithfully that it asphyxi- 
ates. I am glad Mr. Moore sloughed his 
realism as he went on, though it fits in with 
his nature that he should have revolted 
against the insincere art of his day. It is 
not easy for us now to realise what an up- 
heaval these early realistic novels repre- 
sented, and we are inclined to do them less 
than justice. Mr. Moore struggled bravely 
through the surf in these, they developed 
his muscle as a writer, and through them 
he learned to handle his boat " Esther 
Waters " as a master mariner. 

I read "The Mummer's Wife" when I 
lived with the Yeats in Bedford Park, and 
chiefly, with feminine perversity, because 
W. B. Yeats had forbidden his sisters to 
read it. I gulped guilty pages of it as I 
went to bed of nights. Its merciless probing 
into life intimidated me. I shrank from it 
as the periwinkle from the pin. At this 
distance of time I could not perhaps give a 
very clear account of the story, but I will 
agree with anybody that it is a powerful 
novel ; I was impaled on the point of it, and 
I know. I have not the courage to read it 
again. The fat actor who lures away the 
poor little woman who becomes his wife lives 

43 



GEORGE MOORE 



in my memory as one of the most real 
human beings in Enghsh fiction. His rela- 
tions with the woman he lured, away and 
the gradual deterioration of her character 
are depicted with truth so merciless that the 
most severe moralist could have added 
nothing to the lesson it teaches. I under- 
stand that the book is regarded as immoral ; 
to me it appeared one of the most gloomy 
moralities in literature. Mr. Moore is a 
man who by personal preference would like 
all love tales to end happily, but as an artist 
and an Irishman he could not be senti- 
mental, and he degraded the runaway wife 
as if he had learned his doctrine of retribu- 
tion in the plain black and white it would 
have been taught him by any parish priest 
in Connaught. 

On Mr. Moore's return to his native land, 
when I met him for the first time of speech, 
remembering those tortured readings of 
" The Mummer's Wife," as nobody was 
within hearing at the moment, I asked 
him, with the ignorant courage of my Puri- 
tanism, why he wrote such horrible books. 
He answered by asking me had I read any 
of them. I faltered "No" — for I was 
ashamed to confess to " The Mummer's 
Wife." He said with that instant surrender 
to attack so characteristic of him : "I 
wrote one good book, 'Esther Waters.' I 
will get you a copy of it." He went out of 

44 



GEORGE MOORE 



the Homestead office and returned shortly 
with a sixpenny copy of "Esther Waters," 
in which he wrote his name at my request. 
I read the book, and my respect for him 
grew great, for I thought I discovered in it 
not only a brain but a heart, and in spite 
of an extraordinary amount of evidence 
since produced to me of Mr. Moore's want 
of heart, I cannot rid myself of the con- 
viction I felt when I read that book. To 
this eager, inquisitive being who busied 
himself so untiringly about life, and who 
has lived a vicarious life of so much intensity 
in the creatures of his imagination, I could 
almost say when I follow him with heart- 
ache through the story of Esther's suffer- 
ings, told with a most moving sympathy : 
'' For this thy sins be forgiven thee," as 
the man in the audience at Fishamble Street 
theatre cried to the sinful woman who sang 
Handel's angel music at the first perform- 
ance of the " Messiah." 

" Esther Waters " is the story of a servant 
girl, and in that lowly story Mr. Moore has 
expressed the life of the lowly with a most 
finished art and with real tenderness. In 
" The Mummer's Wife " he shows us how 
fiercely life treats the mere wisp of woman- 
hood, without will, without character, who 
is flung into its cruel currents —the fragility 
that is her charm making her ruin the more 
complete and the more tragic. In Esther 

45 



GEORGE MOORE 



Waters we have a woman refined, delicate, 
but in whom will and affection are so strong 
that her character begins to grow from the 
very moment when its destruction seemed 
inevitable. Mr. Moore has an almost un- 
canny insight into a woman's being. In 
" The Mummer's Wife " his analysis of the 
emotions is so minute that one's sensibilities 
are excited to a point that is quite painful. 
In " Esther Waters " it is one's heart that 
is touched. The following extract from the 
preface to the cheap edition of the book 
issued in 1899 shows us a Moore whom 
perhaps many of his readers will not recog- 
nise and whose acquaintance, I imagine, Mr. 
Moore himself made with some surprise. He 
says : " It was very generally assumed that 
its (' Esther Waters' ') object was to agitate 
for a law to prevent betting rather than to 
exhibit the beauty of the simple heart and 
to inculcate a love of goodness. The teach- 
ing of ' Esther Waters ' is as non-combative 
as the Beatitudes. Betting may be an evil, 
but what is evil is always uncertain, whereas 
there can be no question that to refrain from 
judging others, from despising the poor in 
spirit and those who do not possess the 
wealth of the world is certain virtue. That 
all things that live are to be pitied is the 
lesson that I learn from reading my book, 
and that others may learn as much is my 
hope." It was the first time in literature 

46 



GEORGE MOORE 



that the Hfe of a servant girl was treated 
with the sincerity of an artist. Mr. Moore 
had none of the desire to exhibit his Esther 
in the kind of picturesque way Dickens ex- 
hibits his characters. We can imagine 
Dickens, in spite of his humanity, reflecting : 
" How amusing these people are." Mr. 
Moore seems to say rather : " How alike 
everywhere is the human heart." He has 
no bias, he never patronises his servant. He 
does not look for the picturesque, but only 
traces the love of a mother for her child 
with a sincerity which, as I said before, was 
probably amazing to himself. 

It is a curious matter this of the novelist ; 
if one examined into it one would wander 
in dark labyrinths. If the novelist Hves in 
his characters, who control him for the 
moment as the medium's body is controlled, 
and he receives vision through them and 
realises through them the purposes of life, 
will this imaginative life count anything to 
him who outside his writings— for all record 
we have of him— has just been a digestion 
and a breathing apparatus, a life so vicarious, 
that the wittiest woman in Dublin said of 
him : " Some men kiss and tell, Mr. Moore 
tells but doesn't kiss." Will there be any- 
thing chalked up to his credit in the tavern 
of life when he comes to drink again ? I 
leave it to you, my readers, I am no meta- 
physician. Here is a man, Moore, who has 

47 



GEORGE MOORE 



to many minds profaned his home, his 
parents, his most sacred ties, to whom 
writing is father, mother, home, lover, 
friend, Hfe itself, who when he ceases to 
write will cease to live and will crumple up 
shapeless, nameless, mortal. What is there 
to him — any way — more than to a miner 
who sweats chunks out of the earth, who 
marries and leaves hearty children to per- 
petuate mining and the Iron Age of Man ? 

In the year following the publication of 
'' Esther Waters " Mr. Moore published 
" Celibates." It is written with great con- 
fidence and ease and shows Mr. Moore 
getting a grip of himself and his powers and 
possibilities as a writer. The morbid states 
it deals with are treated with none of the 
waywardness we are inclined to associate 
with Mr. Moore. The adventurer in life 
comes upon strange discoveries, and the 
novelist must be in a sense a pathologist of 
the emotions. It is when he goes beyond 
this and becomes the pathologist pure and 
simple that he nauseates us. Mr. Moore is 
too good an artist to make this mistake. 
He faces life as squarely as any writer I 
know, but one is in no danger of mistaking 
a page in any of his novels for a page in a 
medical journal ; a confusion of mind that 
one sometimes experiences in reading a 
modern novel. Mr. Moore's discoveries in 
life are not for the medical museum, but for 

48 



GEORGE MOORE 



the picture gallery. Mildred Lawson is a 
very clever study of a feminine George 
Moore — the same temperament with a 
woman's instinctive intellectuality, self-con- 
scious but not profoundly so. John Norton 
is the voyager who hugs the shores of life ; 
who has no confidence in his own nature ; 
who is austere rather from timidity of 
temperament than from any moral self- 
consciousness. Mr. Moore has analysed him 
very ably. Agnes Lahens and Kitty Hare 
are snowflakes — exquisite, unsubstantial, 
reaching earth only to die. 

" Celibates " is serious work, yet I find 
in it something that alienates. It opens up 
fields of speculation, and I delight in specula- 
tion where the mind takes wing, but such 
speculations as are here do not liberate the 
mind, they rather lead it into a blind alley. 
I am always inclined to take a book as a 
living creature, make friends with it or 
leave it alone as it attracts or repels. " Celi- 
bates " is one of Mr. Moore's books that I 
should leave alone. 

" Memoirs of My Dead Life " is a book 
that attracts, and though there is much of 
the dead life resurrected in it that Mr. 
Moore would have done well to leave in 
its grave, for it has seen corruption and is 
unfit to be above ground — and much of it 
that should never have been born — ^there 
are some beautiful things in the book. 
D 49 



GEORGE MOORE 



" Spring in London," " Marie Pellegrin," 
"A Remembrance," "A Waitress," '' Re- 
surgam," should not die. This is the Mr. 
Moore whom we know in '' Esther Waters," 
who reveals himself partially in " The Lake," 
who is continually with us in " The Untilled 
Field," and of whom we have fitful glimpses 
in the waywardness of ''Ave, Salve and 
Vale." The Moore who is neither a mock 
satyr, nor a nasty little schoolboy, but a 
thinker and a warm-hearted human being. 
This book is Mr. Moore's second essay in 
confessions, and while it is an advance on 
" The Confessions of a Young Man," showing 
greater power of selection and expression 
and less perversity and vanity — for life had 
no doubt been sitting heavily on Mr. Moore's 
head since those early days — it has not the 
fine originality, the wit and skill and malice 
and the entire indiscretion of the great 
Trilogy. Mr. Moore, who desires to pose 
before the world as the passionate lover, is 
quite unconvincing in this part. He is really 
interested in affection, and I think there are 
few writers who approach this subject with 
greater delicacy or fuller comprehension. 
The element of fantasy with which nature 
has endowed Mr. Moore began to appear for 
the first time in " Memoirs of My Dead 
Life," breaking out there as the heather 
does in a reclaimed field. How easy it 
would have been for this versatile artist 

50 



GEORGE MOORE 



to have been a writer of fantasies rather 
than a reahst will appear from the following 
passage in "Resurgam." Perhaps he would 
have been a much greater writer if he could 
have mingled both moods together. We 
sigh for a little fantasy when we read the 
realistic novels, and Mr. Moore himself must 
have sighed for it also, for he finally broke 
away from naturalism and achieved a style 
in which his whole being could be reflected. 
He says in " Resurgam " : " Twenty priests 
had been engaged to sing a Mass, and whilst 
they chanted, my mind continued to roam, 
seeking the unattainable, seeking that which 
Raminese had been unable to find. Unex- 
pectedly, at the very moment when the 
priest began to intone the Pater Noster, I 
thought of the deep sea as the only clean 
and holy receptacle for the vase containing 
my ashes. If it were dropped where the 
sea is deepest, it would not reach the bottom, 
but would hang suspended in dark moveless 
depths where only a few fishes range, in a 
cool, deep grave ' made without hands, in 
a world without stain,' surrounded by a 
lovely revel of Bacchanals, youths and 
maidens, and wild creatures from the woods, 
man in his primitive animality. But nothing 
lasts for ever. In some millions of years 
the sea will begin to wither, and the vase 
containing me will sink. My hope is that it 
will sink down to some secure foundation 

51 



GEORGE MOORE 



of rocks, to stand in the airless and waterless 
desert that the earth will then be. Raminese 
failed, but I shall succeed. Surrounded by 
dancing youths and maidens, my tomb shall 
stand on a high rock in the solitude of the 
extinct sea of an extinct planet. Millions of 
years will pass away, and the earth, after 
having lain dead for a long winter, as it 
does now for a few weeks under frost and 
snow, will, with all other revolving planets, 
become absorbed in the sun, and the sun 
itself will become absorbed in greater suns, 
Sirius and his like. In matters of grave 
moment, millions of years are but seconds ; 
billions convey very little to our minds. 
At the end of, let us say, some billion years 
the ultimate moment towards which every- 
thing from the beginning has been moving 
will be reached ; and from that moment 
the tide will begin to flow out again, and the 
eternal dispersal of things will begin again ; 
suns will be scattered abroad, and in tre- 
mendous sunquakes planets will be thrown 
off ; in loud earthquakes these planets will 
throw off moons. Millions of years will pass 
away, the earth will become cool, and out 
of the primal mud life wdll begin again in 
the shape of plants, then of fish, and then 
of animals. It is like madness, but is it 
madder than Christian doctrine ? And I 
believe that, billions of years hence, I shall 
be sitting in the same room as I sit now, 

52 



GEORGE MOORE 



writing the same lines as I am now writing : 
I believe that again, a few years later, my 
ashes will swing in the moveless and silent 
depths of the Pacific ocean, and that the 
same figures, the same nymphs and the same 
fauns will dance around me again." 

I cannot help feeling that in " Evelyn 
Innes," published in 1898, Mr. Moore was 
at a stagnant period in his development as 
a writer. Perhaps he was ready for that 
troubling of the waters that came to him 
in the call to Ireland a little later. There is 
everything in " Evelyn Innes " to make it 
a fine novel; an eternal idea— the struggle 
of the spirit and the flesh— but the success 
does not come off. This is, I think, because 
Mr. Moore, while very fully assured about 
the flesh, is diffident about the spirit, and 
leaves us in the end undecided as to what in 
Evelyn is fighting the affection of Sir Owen 
Asher, an affection which seems to us a 
more spiritual thing than the supposed 
spiritual influence into which she is drawn. 
Mr. Moore is not convincing in his Cardinal, 
his Eminence does not satisfy us any more 
than he does Mr. Moore, and above all he 
does not satisfy Evelyn. His failure is Mr. 
Moore's own failure, lack of spirituality. 
Nevertheless " Evelyn Innes " will be for 
many readers Mr. Moore's most popular 
piece of work, and I hardly like to suggest 
that this may be because it has some 

53 



GEORGE MOORE 



touches which show Mr. Moore to have a 
sneaking regard for Ouida. I am not above 
this feeling myself. Is it not a little reminis- 
cent of Ouida when Sir Owen Asher leads 
Evelyn through his hall on the evening of 
their flight to Paris? "Crossing the tessel- 
lated pavement through all the footmen, 
the majestic butler there solemn as an idol," 
" Owen bends over a marble table to scribble 
a note." Yes, and in Ouida's hands the pen 
would have been of gold with a handle of 
porphyry. I believe Owen Asher is the arche- 
type on which Mr. Moore had fain fashioned 
himself. For his secondary hero Ulick 
Deane, he chose Mr. Yeats first, then tried 
to fit "^" into the part; afterwards re- 
jecting both of these, he fixed on a hero who 
to our great sorrow was unknown to us in 
Dublin. The resemblance of Sir Owen Asher 
to Mr. Moore is very strong when in the 
scene where Owen learns that Evelyn has 
finally forsaken him for the Church, he roars 
and yells in agony in the presence of Ulick 
Deane and Merat the maid. I think, accord- 
ing to a Dublin legend, Mr. Moore behaved 
in much the same way when his cook spoiled 
an omelette ! 

All the same, I am touched by "Evelyn 
Innes," and I think all that is obscure in 
Mr. Moore's design in writing it explains 
itself in the last few pages of its companion 
book " Sister Teresa." Mr. Moore writes a 

54 



GEORGE MOORE 



moving preface to the second edition of 
'' Sister Teresa," and in the story of the 
unveihng of Frenhofer's picture, " confused 
colour and incoherent form, and in one 
corner a delicious foot, a living foot escaped 
by a miracle from a slow progressive de- 
struction," does Mr. Moore refer to those 
last few pages ? I find it so, and the two 
books gather a meaning for me in that scene 
when Evelyn and Sir Owen meet in the 
garden where the nightingales answer one 
another. " Mute in the midst of that im- 
mortal symphony about them" — a scene 
that holds the nearest approach to spiritu- 
ality in any of Mr. Moore's novels. What 
woman will not be touched by a novel 
where, as Mr. Moore says, " love is the 
only motive " ? "A love story, the first 
written in English for three hundred years." 
There is a great deal of what I have called 
the millinery and confectionery of love, no 
doubt, but while this is a necessity to Mr. 
Moore to supply his lack of passion, out of it 
emerges affection, that quality in which, as 
I noticed before, Mr. Moore is really inter- 
ested, and which reaches us in these two 
books through all their wearisome detail. 

Mr. Moore republished last year his 
" Drama in Muslin " under the name of 
" Muslin " and fitted it with a preface — a 
Georgian preface to an early Victorian novel. 
It is a most unsuitable preface, but it is in 

55 



GEORGE MOORE 



his later and better manner, the manner of 
" Ave." He threatens to become an eminent 
prefacer, an alarming threat. He has to 
some extent rewritten the book, and this 
makes it interesting to the student of his 
style. He can note pretty closely the com- 
mentary of the elderly George the stylist 
on the youthful George the story-teller. 

Years ago in the west of Ireland, I was 
present at a prize-giving in a convent that I 
believe has some credit there as a place of 
education for girls. The Catholic Bishop 
of the diocese presided, and it was to me as 
if the solid ground had fissured beneath my 
feet revealing an underworld entirely un- 
suspected. In the narrow pride of my 
Ascendancy I had never dreamed of a 
Catholic Ireland that had its own presiding 
lawn sleeves, its own yards of white muslin 
billowing in restless rows, representing money 
that could be paid and was paid for teaching 
in French and the piano and the violin, all 
the very same trappings of education that I 
believed only to exist among the Ascendancy 
under whose shadow I was nurtured. And 
that these white forms represented young 
ladies who, when they dispersed from the 
convent, would each adorn a real home and 
a society that really existed behind the 
barriers of the R.M., the D.I., the Rector, 
the bankers and the county gentry ; a 
society with its grades and its codes of 

56 



GEORGE MOOUE 



manners as strict as any I had known, 
this was surely an amazing thing. The 
whole solid ground of my experience trem- 
bled. How^ was it I had never glimpsed 
these muslin forms behind my Ascendancy 
barriers, never realised this excellent imita- 
tion of Society as I knew it ? Almost the 
same it seemed to be, a redder hand here and 
there perhaps, a heavier foot, but social and 
in the full swing of life ? The walled garden 
of the Ascendancy was no more to me a 
world, but a walled garden, and I another 
Eve, curious as the first. My inquisition 
was rewarded when I read " The Drama in 
Muslin." I had found my convent. It was 
on English soil no doubt, but its dispersed 
pupils went home to Ireland, and save that 
one takes for granted that they were not 
behind any social barriers there, as the 
muslin-frocked maidens of my earlier know- 
ledge, how little different are they ! Always 
apart, preserving their hereditary charac- 
teristics as surely as the Jews. Mr. Moore's 
muslin girls play their parts in a drama 
of the Zenana, so thick is the purdah separ- 
ating them from the strong boot and short 
skirt life in the south-western counties as 
my youth knew it in a decade or so after 
Mr. Moore. 

Some decades have passed since then, with 
a breaking down of many barriers. I wonder 
if this generation of Protestants in the Irish 

57 



GEORGE MOORE 



provinces realises at all the social aloofness 
of the two religions in the days I write of, 
when in the west of Ireland a Catholic 
nurse might indeed hold a Protestant infant 
in her arms at the Protestant baptismal 
font, and hear our heresies unhindered, but 
a Protestant vestry could prevent the burial 
of a Catholic wife in the same grave as her 
Protestant husband, lest it might mar the 
perfection of a Protestant resurrection. The 
tables have turned on us now and we cannot 
complain, but are the barriers breaking 
down, is the fissure narrowing ? 

I have lingered willingly over " Muslin," 
though to the critic my choice of this novel 
may seem an unintelligible fancy. I know 
my literary armour is not proof against 
attack, any bow drawn at a venture might 
hit me, so I fight my corner in my own way, 
following no rules but planting a blow 
wherever I can. "Muslin" is an Irish story, 
and I am writing of a man who is more 
characteristic of his nation than a Carson 
or a Redmond. In my writing I am like 
the child who suffers the meat course, but 
saves his appetite for the pudding. Moore 
the Irishman, Moore as we knew him in 
Dublin, is my pudding. 



58 



VIII 

Mr. Moore is an Irishman. He was born 
in Mayo, where his family had been settled 
for several generations. He himself claims 
an English origin, but like Peter the Galilean, 
who, in spite of his accent, would have 
denied his province, the accent of Mr. 
Moore's mind bewrayeth him. And if one 
had no other evidence of his Irish origin, 
" Parnell and his Island," written with all 
the malignity of kinship, would have re- 
vealed it. 

Everyone who writes about Ireland takes 
it for granted that it is a sick country, and 
each writer has his nostrum. I wonder are 
we really as sick as the doctors say, and 
shall I also in a page or so be advertising 
my potion ? Opinions are divided also as 
to the identity of the patient, and the ques- 
tion " What is an Irishman ? " causes almost 
as much concern as a lately debated problem 
" What is whiskey ? " Ireland is full of 
people all so busied in being Catholics and 
Protestants and Unionists and Nationalists 
that they have no time to betray any Irish 
character. Mr. Moore resisted the tempta- 
tion common to every Irishman to obliterate 

59 



GEORGE MOORE 



himself in a movement, consequently his 
Irish character had a chance to emerge. 
But on those who have effaced their identity 
in religious or party nomenclature the ques- 
tion as to who is the real Irishman must 
continually obtrude itself. Can it be decided 
by religion, politics, lineage or name ? The 
little weeklies are often very fierce; mostly 
Catholic and Nationalist, it seems to me 
they would have these terms interchange- 
able ; to be Irish, they suggest one must be 
both. Hence the Nationalist and Catholic 
descendants of Cromwell's troopers with 
names unmistakably Saxon are accounted 
Irish, while such as I, a Protestant, having 
names stiff with Gaeldom in every genera- 
tion of my family, have our claim to Ireland 
disallowed. Yet it is an old truism that for 
leaders Irish Nationality had Emmet, Tone, 
Fitzgerald, Mitchell, Davis, Parnell, all Pro- 
testants. 

In Ireland a man's religion is not a per- 
sonal and private matter, as in other coun- 
tries it may be ; it is a public business, and 
the getting or not getting a job is involved 
in it. This being so, perhaps one should not 
drop one's eyes timidly when the subject 
of religion appears, but confront it boldly 
and examine into it. Boldly then I speak 
as a Protestant, and my Catholic friends 
shall hear a stiff -kneed Protestant confess. 
Irish Protestants have two inheritances : one 

60 



GEORGE MOORE 



is Foxe's " Book of Martyrs," the other is 
the history of their country. One tells of 
martyrdoms to Rome, the other of martyr- 
doms to England : the result being, in 
minds inclined to justice, a very cordial bias 
against both powers. The hounds of time 
had left us very little of Foxe but his brush ; 
but England is ever with us, and those 
Protestants in Ireland who did not hate 
her for her treatment of their Gaelic ances- 
tors were beginning to cultivate a very 
pretty exasperation with her treatment of 
themselves. One is often inclined to credit 
England with more brains than she possesses, 
and we may be wrong who imagine her 
policy is always to divide us in Ireland. She 
has sold this country so very often that we 
are either obliged to consider her diabolically 
clever or ourselves idiotically stupid, and 
of course the latter idea is a distasteful one. 
It was an old but always pleasant discovery 
to England that bishops are as a body 
pretty sure to be on the side of stability 
and safety and against violence, and in ruling 
Ireland through the Catholic bishops she 
secured safety from agrarian crime ; but the 
fostering of a New Ascendancy brought 
about Hibernianism as the fostering of the 
Old brought Orangeism, and then came the 
Insurance Act, giving such a fillip to the 
Catholic Orangeman that the Protestant 
Orangeman who had become sleepy and 

61 



GEORGE MOORE 



indifferent began to feel stirrings of life 
again. The revival of his old sectarian 
doctrines in a Catholic translation brought 
the Orangeman to his feet. The sons of 
William rose, and while Joe Devlin, the 
Captain of the Hibernian team, kicked Ire- 
land back one hundred years, Edward Carson, 
the Protestant Devlin, not to be outdone, 
with his Orangeman kicked her back a little 
further. And so it came to pass that the 
outbreak of a European war found one por- 
tion of Ireland organised, armed and drilled, 
and the other portion beginning to do like- 
wise, and I for one can never make out 
whether this state of things was due to the 
Act of God or the King's enemies or to his 
friends the English Junkers who wanted 
recruits out of Ireland. 

Is it any wonder that the inhabitant of a 
country such as ours, where so many creeds 
and parties clamour for a man's soul, cannot 
resist the temptation offered him of a com- 
fortable pigeonhole retreat for it where it 
need never agitate him again? A country 
where it is more convenient to be anything 
rather than an Irishman. There are just 
two or three persons in Ireland who walk 
about freely unclaimed by any Shibboleth, 
and the tenants of the pigeonholes peer at 
them, some in admiration, some in fear, 
some in dislike. 

When Mr. Moore came over to Ireland at 
62 



GEORGE MOORE 



the time of the Boer War he was perhaps 
obeying his natural instinct as an Irishman : 
he was seeking his pigeonhole, and it is a 
proof of his strong individualism that in 
spite of the agonising desire to retreat there 
that he describes so graphically in " Ave," 
he resisted the temptation. Ten years of 
Ireland couldn't fetter him. Neither the 
Gaelic League, the Nationalists, the Catholics 
or the Protestants could detain this slippery 
customer, and he left Ireland with a gibe 
for them all, sparing only those amongst his 
friends whose independence of mind and 
indifference to his opinion perhaps pro- 
tected them — ".E," John Eglinton, and 
Oliver Gogarty. 

It is very entertaining to read in "Ave" 
Mr. Moore's elaborate staging of his Irish 
career. It is not unusual for a man to see 
himself dramatically, but it is not given to 
every man to plan out a moving scenario 
for his life and then to make his actions 
fit it. I cannot help suspecting that Mr. 
Moore may have sketched out his " Ave, 
Salve and Vale " before ever he set foot in 
Dublin, and when he leaped upon the stage 
here all was prepared to his own order. 
But Mr. Moore, though a clever Irishman, 
was not, like so many others of his clever 
countrymen, clever enough to keep out of 
Ireland. 

We in Ireland are gifted beyond most 
63 



GEORGE MOORE 



peoples with a talent for acting, and in 
Dublin especially, while scorning culture, 
which indeed we have not got, we are pos- 
sessed of a most futile and diverting clever- 
ness. Mr. Moore's entrance on the stage in 
Dublin was marred by an audience having 
as much dramatic talent as he himself, and 
each so full of admiration for his own 
exercise of it that he had only a fierce 
criticism and no appreciation to give a 
rival player. We Irish are very much 
aware of our art as actors, we seldom lose 
ourselves in it, but Mr. Moore's dramatic 
concern with himself is so much inwoven in 
his nature that he can only be really himself 
in the various poses he assumes. He is 
absolutely sincere in each, and his Gaelic 
pose had for him a momentous importance 
that provoked the merriment of Dublin, 
where no one really believes in anything 
and where nothing matters at all save as 
providing a subject for conversation, and 
where if by chance a noble aspiration arises 
in some heart, the effect of its utterance is 
exploded in the percussion of a drawing- 
room jest. 

For the cause of his failure in Ireland 
Mr. Moore, I think, sought everywhere but 
in the right quarter, the quarter I have in- 
dicated above. His discovery that Catholi- 
cism was to blame for all the futility of 
Ireland was a very diverting one to many 

64 



GEORGE MOORE 



people who never knew of Mr. Moore's 
Catholicism till he announced his Protestant- 
ism, and who thought his conception of the 
one religion as funny as his conception of 
the other. In pursuance of my resolution 
to wear no blinkers in this book, I am not 
afraid to state that I think the silence as 
regards discussion of their religious ideals 
between Catholics and Protestants is the 
most powerful cause of the cleavage between 
the creeds in this country. It leads to the 
most absurd misconceptions of each other's 
beliefs. I do not complain of any silence 
in the Press representing either side — good- 
ness knows these have yelled loudly enough, 
and I think the Protestant has out -yelled 
the Catholic — I mean the silence of social 
intercourse, the absence of discussion. I 
speak as a fool perhaps, and my plea for 
discussion may be due to my own " absurd 
misconception " of the Catholic belief. The 
discussion of Catholicism with Irish Catholics 
— except in the ardent and early days of the 
Irish Church Missions — is considered among 
decent Protestants nowadays as a hitting 
below the belt. I can never be quite sure if 
this is because Catholicism in Ireland is 
reckoned among Protestants as largely the 
religion of the poor and as so ennobled by 
their sufferings for it that it is sacred from 
our criticism, or if deep down in the incur- 
able Protestant mind there is not a per- 
E 65 



GEORGE MOORE 



suasion that to Catholics must be extended 
the forbearance one gives to lunatics or 
children, poor things with whom no rational 
subject should be discussed and whose 
wildest statements should be allowed to 
pass unchallenged ; and that the shyness of 
Catholics in speaking to us of their religion 
proceeds from the fear of our laughter and 
of being led away by our superior wisdom. 
Where the first reason moves Protestants 
silence is right and just; Protestantism in 
Ireland has a bitter record and it does well 
to hold its tongue ; but to those who are 
neither poor nor unlearned, why offer the 
insult of our silence ? My panacea, as you 
may perceive, has at last been offered ; I 
cannot escape the common fate of a writer 
about Ireland. Free discussion is my potion. 
For God's sake let us discuss everything. 
So only shall we approach each other and 
learn respect for each other's point of view. 
Everyone knows the value of discussion in 
elucidating one's own cleverness and fixing 
one more firmly than ever in one's own 
opinion, and I have no doubt that free dis- 
cussions between the religions in Ireland 
would be of more value to Catholicism here 
than much motu proprio and many ne temere 
decrees, for these it seems to me in another 
nation have paved the way to statutes like 
to Prcemunire, 

It may be that my little ripple of wisdom 
66 



GEORGE MOORE 



will babble in vain against the Rock of 
Peter, but it is in my nature to ripple on. 
And as to Protestants, it was said once of a 
noble family in the west of Ireland, " You 
will never get anything out of a Browne 
unless you kick him first," and perhaps my 
Protestants will respond to much kicking 
and admit that their empty places of worship 
bear witness to the fatal influence of pros- 
perity upon a Christian Church, and will go 
down on their knees and ask for the hasten- 
ing of those Protestant Penal Laws that 
some of us may feel are already overdue. 

While I am not at all sure that the frank- 
ness of Mr. Moore the Catholic was not 
without benefit to that religion in Ireland, 
I am perfectly sure that a Protestant Mr. 
Moore is badly needed to turn the hose- 
pipe of his criticism on Protestant Ireland, 
and if Mr. Moore feels sufficiently confirmed 
in the faith to attempt it I invite him to the 
task. 



67 



IX 



In " Parnell and His Island " I find proof 
of Mr. Moore's nationality as an Irishman, 
because the contempt and scorn in it are 
too bitter to be the work of an alien. The 
gibe that we fling at an alien glances off 
because our knowledge of him is seldom 
intimate enough to point it, but when we 
desire to wound our own people, knowing 
the vulnerable spots, our shafts get home. 
There is to me more indecency in " Parnell 
and His Island " than in those of Mr. 
Moore's books where this characteristic is 
said to predominate. It is indecent in the 
revolting display he makes of his country's 
hurt. Aristophanes in Athens dared the 
wrath of the Athenians when he satirised 
their popular hero Cleon and himself took 
the part of the character he satirised. That 
is courage; if he had produced his play in 
Sparta it would have been cowardice and a 
treachery to his own city. What shall we 
say of Mr. Moore who exhibits his country's 
sores for the coppers of the Paris press, for 
he wrote the book first for a French news- 
paper. In all he has written about his 
friends, all his indefensible association of 

68 



GEORGE MOORE 



their names with events wholly fictitious, I 
have never felt him so shameful as he is in 
this book. Of course he never libelled me 
in any of his work— and perhaps his fiction 
had a certain art about it that blinded me 
to its baseness and it was fiction. There is 
no art in " Parnell and His Island," and 
there is sufficient truth in it to make it a 
horrible exhibition of Mr. Moore's own soul. 
The writing is bad and immature, and Mr. 
Moore's almost ludicrous haste to dissociate 
himself from his country only implicates 
him in it more hopelessly, because a mere 
English settler, as he strives to represent 
himself, would have felt none of the pain 
that shrieks from every page of the book. 
He would have had the contempt no doubt, 
if he was made like Mr. Moore, but the pain 
he would not have felt, nor if he had felt it 
would it have reached us as through Mr. 
Moore it reaches us. As an artist Mr. 
Moore must thoroughly regret " Parnell and 
His Island," and it is one of the books he 
has never ventured to rewrite, though I 
surmise black streams from it trickling 
through others of his books. I do not dis- 
like " Parnell and His Island " because in 
it Mr. Moore traduces his country. Irish- 
men continually traduce their country and 
sometimes as much by their praise as by 
their blame, but because in this book he 
identifies himself with her, though such 

69 



GEORGE MOORE 



was not his intention, and the sharp edge 
of truth bites in this identity and it wounds, 
because there does exist such an Irishman 
as Mr. Moore proves himself to be here. I 
wish there was no such Irishman and that 
Mr. Moore had not had to pass this way on 
his journey to " The Untilled Field." Mr. 
Moore's mind has a continual tendency to 
nausea which spoils him as an artist. He 
writes contemptuously in " Ave " of the 
Irish that Douglas Hyde spoke, pouring as 
inky stuff out of his mouth, but Mr. Moore's 
pages are perpetually stained with the inky 
vomit of a mind incontinent. This may be 
salutary for Mr. Moore, but it is very un- 
pleasant for his readers. 

It seems a curious thing that a man like 
Mr. Moore, who in his early work disowned 
Ireland, should have been drawn to her 
later in life. We are not now even sure — 
eminent farewellist as he is — that he has 
really left her. It seems curious, but I find 
it quite natural. Hate is the other magnetic 
pole of love and draws its object towards it 
just as surely. Mr. Moore's hatred of Ire- 
land polarised his thoughts towards Ireland 
and in the end he came here. Sometimes 
I fear that the hatred to England evinced 
by some of our journalists has so preoccupied 
minds that might have been of service to 
Ireland that it has caused them to educate 
their readers far more in England's concerns 

70 



GEORGE MOORE 



than in those of their own nation. There 
is no safety for a man in the practice of the 
black magic of hatred. It binds him hand 
and foot and leads him whither he would 
not. 

Mr. Moore's hatred of his native land is 
responsible no doubt for that overturning of 
his life that drew him thither. There is 
much that is absurd in his own account of 
his gradual divorce from a Mafficking London, 
but there is also much that is pathetic. I 
was living in London at that time myself, 
and I remember the tin-pot heroics that 
clanked side by side with real heroism. I 
remember tawdry and tipsy processions, 
headed by a whiskey bottle in Hammer- 
smith Broadway, and the trays and baths 
and tin trumpets wherewith respectable 
suburban London signalised a British vic- 
tory. I remember the raw boys, under- 
sized, underfed, filling the departing trains, 
the anguish, the fear, the shameful joys of 
victory. England becoming self-conscious, 
the tipsy bully lashing himself into what he 
believed was a similitude of Elizabethan 
greatness. It was very pitiful and very 
human, and South Africa was very far away. 
The London that I see to-day in the trough 
of heavy seas is a very different place. It 
has grown up suddenly and in company 
with a grown-up England. The tipsy bully 
was sobered in South Africa by the cold 

71 



GEORGE MOORE 



water of many defeats. The final victory 
indeed was England's, but not until she had 
been taught a lesson by a handful of obscur- 
antist farmers. To-day she is fighting a 
bully of her own size, it is a graver and a 
deadlier struggle, and it is at her own doors. 
England is anguished indeed, and the tea- 
tray and the bath heroics have passed away. 
A real heroism, I think, has taken their 
place, and some of the fineness of Elizabethan 
England has returned. 

Mr. Moore's departure from England at 
the time of the Boer War was forced on 
him by a real loathing of London's attitude 
at that time and by as sincere a desire to 
stand by his country as was possible to his 
wayward heart. I have said many harsh 
things of Mr. Moore, though never anything 
so bad as he has said of himself, but the 
interior sincerity that prompted his return 
to Ireland I have never doubted, however 
I may have chuckled at his staging of the 
part he played here. 



72 



X 



Perhaps one might say that " The Untilled 
Field " was Mr. Moore's indemnity to Ire- 
land for " Parnell and His Island." I often 
wonder if it was his own nature that took 
him by the hand and showed him the Ire- 
land that we find in this book, or did a 
friendly finger, " ^'s " or Turgenieff' s, un- 
seal his darkened eyes. I can realise per- 
fectly what Mr. Moore felt when he came to 
Dublin and found himself in a town that, 
even when it had heard of them, cared 
nothing for Manet, for Balzac, for Turgenieff, 
for French poets however exquisite; that 
recked naught of the differences between 
turbot and halibut and hake, or the sauces 
which should or should not accompany 
these ; a people to whom all Moores were 
equal, him of the Melodies and him of the 
Almanac, and to whom Frankfort was as 
great as George. Yet a puzzling people, 
because though they cared nothing for cul- 
ture, and ate but never dined, were yet so 
nimble of wit, so polished of tongue, that 
they could not be passed over as of no 
account. A people from whom he felt 
absolutely divergent in all matters of taste 

73 



GEORGE MOORE 



and yet with whom he had ties of tempera- 
ment stronger than in either of the countries 
where he had sojourned. The Ireland Mr. 
Moore knew in his early days was all a 
confusion to him, and detestable because 
his crude and immature art could not cope 
with it. We always detest what we desire 
to mould and yet cannot bend to our pur- 
pose. Out of that detestation he wrote 
''Parnell and His Island." But the Mr. 
Moore who found himself in Ireland at the 
time of the Boer War, had matured and was 
achieving his literary style. He heard all 
round him, amongst people whose lack of 
culture he despised, brilliant and witty 
conversation. He heard Yeats and " iE " 
and Hughes and John Eglinton and Gill all 
talking the most excellent copy, and in high 
good humour at the discovery of so rich a 
soil he sat down and wrote the best-natured 
book he ever wrote about Ireland, " The 
Untilled Field." He felt no doubt that 
Ireland could be made productive of much 
good literature for him if he only tilled it. 
Alas, he did not realise that mental tillage 
had gone out of fashion here and that our 
intellect is all laid down in grass. 

Mr. Moore's passion for re-writing led him 
somewhat astray in " The Untilled Field." 
The first edition had a spontaneity and 
simplicity that are sometimes lost in the 
latest one. The reader is vexed by the drag- 

74 



GEORGE MOORE 



ging into the text of a number of Mr. Moore's 
favourite perversities. One recognises them 
so well now, and they serve no earthly pur- 
pose but to irritate the reader and break 
up the form of an earlier and clearer narra- 
tive. The charm of the "Wild Goose" 
was a delicate thing which the last edition 
of " The Untilled Field " has shattered. I 
am all against this continual re- writing of 
books. Re- write by all means again and 
again while the book is in the process of 
making, but do not return to a book after 
years and think to recapture the mood in 
which it was written. When we pull the 
structure to pieces something essential 
escapes, something that was enclosed within 
the walls in the first building. I think Mr. 
Moore became infected by Mr. W. B. Yeats' 
passion for altering his work. In Mr. Moore's 
earlier work he was more occupied with 
the substance than the form, but in his 
later the form tends to master him. The 
effect on the reader of all this re -writing is 
that he begins to doubt the author's in- 
spiration and to believe that he did not 
really know what he wanted to say. That 
definite imagination which is the most 
precious thing in any writer's work and which 
alone gives it authenticity, becomes blurred 
and one begins to suspect the fumbler. 

The preface to the last edition of " The 
Untilled Field " is an entertaining fantasy. 

75 



GEORGE MOORE 



Mr. Moore claims that Synge got from 
reading " The Untilled Field " the inspira- 
tion which drew him out of what Mr. Moore 
calls the " board-school English " of his 
earlier work into the living speech of the 
plays. I am afraid there are few critics of 
Synge who will take this view. It is well 
known to every student of Irish literature 
that Douglas Hyde was the true begetter 
of the rich dialect based upon a foundation 
of Gaelic idiom, and anybody can prove 
this who will turn to Douglas Hyde's render- 
ing in English of the " Love Songs of Con- 
nacht " and the " Commentary." These 
appeared long before either Lady Gregory 
or Synge had loomed upon the literary 
horizon. Hyde was the first who, knowing 
Gaelic thoroughly, was able to discern the 
bony Gaelic structure underlying the Anglo- 
Irish speech, and Synge and Lady Gregory, 
who both had some knowledge of Gaelic, 
were able to follow where Hyde pointed out 
the way. 

The Mr. Moore in " The Untilled Field " 
begins to be a more likeable person than the 
novelist and critic we knew heretofore. He 
devotes as much of his intelligence as he can 
spare from the development of his art to a 
sympathetic study of Ireland and her prob- 
lems. Father McTurnan, Father Maguire, 
Peter O'Shane, Biddy McHale are not cos- 
mopolitan but Irish characters. " The Win- 

76 



GEORGE MOORE 



dow " IS, I think, one of the most poignant 
things Mr. Moore has written. The tales in 
" The Untilled Field " seem to me to be 
less art for art's sake, or even art for Moore's 
sake, than art for life's sake, yet they failed 
to impress Dublin. Many of them were 
translated into Irish, but the Gaehc League 
never seemed to cotton to Mr. Moore, and 
we doubt if " The Untilled Field " as a text- 
book ever enjoyed the popularity accorded 
to the manual that instructed our young 
Gaehc enthusiasm to "Put the butter on 
the^ floor " or recorded the unnatural thirst 
of " Art " who went so often to the well. 
Among Mr. Moore's circle in Dublin it 
awakened a certain nervousness, for Mr. 
Moore was quite manifestly using up his 
friends for copy, and one looked askance at 
another and wondered how much was au- 
thentic in the personal adventures attributed 
to the characters in the book. Mr. Moore's 
friends were to become better instructed as 
to^their function in his literature later on. 

" The Lake," pubHshed in 1905, is memor- 
able because it marks, I think, a change in 
Mr. Moore as a writer. He had found his 
style and from "The Lake" onwards he 
handles it with great ease. There is some 
beautiful writing in " The Lake," and the 
book is a feat of construction because Mr. 
Moore has contrived to make a novel of 
some hundreds of pages out of the medita- 

77 



GEORGE MOORE 



tions of one man walking up and down 
beside his lake and with but one idea in his 
mind. Mr. Moore is independent in " The 
Lake " of any of that paraphernalia of varied 
character on which the novelist usually 
depends. But the book is, after all, a tour 
de force. The meditation of the priest is a 
personal struggle and has little spiritual 
depth or intensity. There is in the book 
more technical merit of writing and con- 
struction than there is profound observa- 
tion of life. The name of the priest, " Oliver 
Gogarty," is taken wholesale from a well- 
known Dublin doctor, and when the bearer 
of the name remonstrated with Mr. Moore, 
Mr. Moore replied : " Where can I get a 
name so good ? " In one sense the book is 
symbolical if not prophetic, for was it not 
about the time of its publication that Mr. 
Moore was preparing to shed the last rags 
of his Catholicism and appear as a naked 
Protestant before an entirely unmoved 
Dublin ? 



78 



XI 

Mr. Moore has summed up in " Ave, Salve 
and Vale " his Irish experiences, and I pro- 
pose in these chapters to sum up our ex- 
periences in Ireland of Mr. Moore. In this now 
famous Trilogy Mr. Moore invented and per- 
fected a strikingly original form of the novel. 
It was nothing new for a novelist to use his 
friends as models, and the circumstances of 
his own life and of theirs as a framework for 
his story. But he was often shy about it, 
and disguised and varied circumstance and 
actor to hide identities. It remained for 
Mr. Moore, who has never put on his clothes 
since the day when as a little boy in Stephen's 
Green he took them all off and ran naked 
to the scandal of his nurse, to do away 
once for all with subterfuge in fiction. 
"The Untilled Field" made his friends 
somewhat nervous, but no names were 
named. In " The Lake " Oliver Gogarty's 
name lent piquancy to Mr. Moore's hero. 
It was a sort of trial trip in nomenclature, 
and its success encouraged Mr. Moore to 
come boldly into the open in " Ave " and 
attach names to their rightful owners, and 
use both names and owners for the purposes 

79 



GEORGE MOORE 



of fiction with a complete disregard for the 
feehngs of the proprietors, marvelling only 
that his friends should prefer immortality 
in any other form than that he had chosen 
for them. And no doubt success justified 
him, for though some of his friends who up 
to this had given him a fool's pardon for his 
many breaches of faith and manners, were 
deeply wounded by the Trilogy, the rest of 
the world were amused and interested by 
this new and daring form of the novel. It 
opens up a horrible vista, if this method of 
writing novels with real characters all under 
their own names should become fashionable, 
and people should even grow so depraved that 
they would actually desire to be in such 
novels, and it may come at last to this, that 
we shall find the fashionable portrait painter 
in literature as well as in art. Sir Edwin 
and Lady Angelina will go to the fashion- 
able portrait-painter in literature and say : 
" We understand your terms for making a por- 
trait novel of the happiest period of our lives, 
for an edition we can distribute to our friends, 
are £500. We have kept our love-letters, and," 
says Sir Edwin, " I have made notes on my 
disappointed rivals, their lives and habits," 
while Lady Angelina slyly slips into the 
painter's hand her notes on the girl who 
wanted to marry Sir Edwin, and all her little 
cackling ways. The Yellow Journalism of 
America, with its shameless inquisition into 

80 



GEORGE MOORE 



private life, has paved the way for a novel 
such as is foreshadowed in " Ave." We are 
a shy people in Ireland now, and Mr. 
Moore's revelations affeeted us to hissing as 
the red-hot iron affects the drop of water. 
It was not always so with us ; when we 
were an independent people our social frank- 
ness was a terror, and our invective hot as 
the hob of hell. 

This personality of ours that we have 
tailored so carefully in tradition and pre- 
judice in order that it may appear with 
fashion and credit amongst the figures of 
our world — is all in ovitcry against the rude 
unrobing of writers such as Mr. Moore. But 
let us be honest. Does not this outcry per- 
haps mean that we fear a deeper inquisi- 
tion and the dragging into publicity of things 
in our nature that might not posture so 
well in the limelight as tliat carefully garbed 
and tutored figure by whom we desire to be 
represented, an inquisition that foreshadows 
that Dread Day when the secrets of all 
hearts shall be made manifest ? I think 
when we go profoundly into ourselves, 
behind this masking personality, we are 
confronted with a franker being who desires 
that all barriers shall be broken down ; who 
realises the oneness of human life, and that 
our lives are continued in the lives of others ; 
one who is weary to death of the elaboration 
of our concealments from one another and 
F 81 



GEORGE MOORE 



who would have all things known, even the 
worst. What is there to be afraid of after 
all in the common humanity we share ? 
Mr. Moore has perhaps encountered this 
being in himself, and has some inkling of this 
truth, but with a perversity usual to him 
he seems to seek truth not for purposes of 
soul but for purposes of art. I sometimes 
think Mr. Moore knows very well what he is 
about, and how wrong is the motive of his 
inquisition into other lives, and that a con- 
sciousness of wrong doing makes him un- 
scrupulous in the uses to which he puts his 
knowledge. 

Mr. Moore should have called his Trilogy 
" George Moore — A Novel of Contemporary 
Life," for it is a work of fiction improvised 
upon his friends and himself. That it is 
exceedingly well done will not console those 
who have gained through it an immortality 
they never coveted. Perhaps there is but 
one portrait in the books that most people 
in Dublin will acknowledge to be a genuine 
one, and that is the portrait of John Eglin- 
ton. Mr. Moore has painted him with great 
skill, real comprehension and kindliness. 
To " ^ " he has been more than kind, 
furnishing one who makes no claim to saint- 
ship with a halo he has no use for. " ^ " 
is reported to have said to him : " Moore, 
you have a passionate literary affection for 
me, but it is the affection of a porcupine, 

82 



GEORGE MOORE 



unconscious of its quills, rubbing itself 
against the bare legs of a child." 
f Mr. Moore has been most flagrantly un- 
just in his portrait of Douglas Hyde, paint- 
ing the outer man indeed with a merciless 
fidelity but totally uncomprehending of the 
real Hyde. It is a portrait that cries aloud 
y for vengeance on the painter. When " ^ " 
jj'told Mr. Moore that his portrait of Hyde 
^ was glaringly unfair, he replied that it was 
a case of Jekyll and Hyde, he had painted 
Hyde and Jekyll was coming on. But 
^ Jekyll never came on. I am inclined to 
j think that an incompatibility of tempera- 
""ment between the two types of Connaught 
men accounts for Mr. Moore's malevolence 
about Douglas Hyde, all the nausea of 
! " Parnell and His Island " surges up again 
in his onslaught on him. How indignant one 
, feels at the base caricature of one whose 
^ name in Ireland is beloved beyond most 
►^ames ; the man who drew out of the gutter 
j^ where we ourselves had flung her, the 
language of our country, and set a crown 
upon her ; who by sheer force of personality 
\ created the movement in Ireland for the re- 
^vival of Gaelic, blowing with a hot enthu- 
llbiasm on that dying spark of nationhood and 
Ij recalling it to life. Those who know " The 
Love Songs of Connacht " will not need to 
be told that here was the soul of a poet. 
The movement he blasted out of the rock of 

1 



GEORGE MOORE 



Anglo-Irish prejudice in his epic. I wonder 
how many people realise to-day in Ireland 
what it meant to give back to the Gael his 
language ; how the honour Hyde put upon 
the language and the literature straightened 
the back of young Ireland and interpene- 
trated all its thoughts. I am prepared to 
be told, with that curious desire to depreciate 
that is common to my countrymen, that the 
Gaelic revival in Ireland was really the work 
of some bookworm or obscure grammarian. 
There are always little persons to be found 
in Dublin grubbing in darkness that they 
may undermine some reputation, but Doug- 
las Hyde is safe in Ireland. We who remem- 
ber those days know what Ireland owes to 
Hyde's fiery spirit, his immense courage, 
his scholarship, his genius for organisation, 
his sincerity, his eloquence, and the kind- 
ness of his heart. 

As to Mr. Moore's little parable of Bouvard 
and Pecuchet. How ungrateful he is to 
Pecuchet, for he must often have watched 
Mr. Gill with half-closed eyes as a cat 
watches a saucer of cream, dreaming of the 
copy he should lap up by and by. Mr. Gill 
was a ready-made Pecuchet, and how well 
Mr. Moore knew him. He had to find his 
Bouvard, and he selected Sir Horace Plun- 
kett, whom he did not know at all, for the 
part. Mr. Moore's comic repentance of this 
caricature I have already described. Few 

84 



} * 



GEORGE MOORE 



people know Sir Horace Plunkett ; though 
he is the most approachable of men, he is 

^ reserved as only your frank Irishman can 
be. His portrait presents many difficulties, 
for I might say with perfect truth that he is 
a statesman, a large-minded, clear-thinking, 
most witty and most courteous gentleman, 
and I should not have conveyed any worthy 

[' picture of him or one at all equal to that 
which springs up in the minds of his friends 
at the mention of his name. He stands, I 
think, this unassuming figure, for something 
that shall be more intimately of the future 
spirit of our country than any shouting 

^ shibboleth of to-day. That one who is so 
typically an Irishman in the individualism 
of his thinking should be little understood 
in his own country is not perhaps very 
wonderful. In Ireland we are accustomed 
to see a man's mind obliterated in the 
movement with which it is identified, and 
that Sir Horace has not so obliterated his 

f mind somewhat disconcerts us. Much has 
been written of him in praise and blame, 
and I see no reason why I should not sum 
up the view he presents to my mind. I see 

( him as a man who does his own thinking, 

i excluding no one's opinions, however ex- 

ftreme, but considering all ideas that are 
presented to him with a mind dispassionate, 
but never cold. His judgment is never 
clouded by temper, and one can always 

f 85 



GEORGE MOORE 



trust him absolutely in every circumstance 
to take the noble point of view. He is gifted 
also in a way that is not perhaps generally 
realised with a wit that bites like mustard, 
and gets home to its mark as unerringly as 
the arrow of William Tell. 



■: 



86 



XII 

I HAVE some right, I think, to speak of 
Dublin at the time of Mr. Moore's advent, 
for I was living here myself, and I was ac- 
quainted with many of the dramatis personse 
amongst whom Mr. Moore was shortly to 
distribute their parts. I can thoroughly 
realise the feeling of Mr. Moore, who, living 
in London, had smelt out the pie that was 
being made in Dublin and felt that he 
himself was one of the ingredients that must 
not be missing. I, too, had my feelings in 
the matter of pies. When I was a young 
girl in Dublin I lived next door to the family 
of Purser, and Miss Sarah Purser, then as 
now the wittiest woman in Dublin, was the 
heroine of my girlish imagination. I felt 
I had no talents to equal me to such people, 
but I had a singing voice and through it I 
would claim my right to be among them. 
Many a time have I sat on the stairs at the 
top of the house singing away my whole 
soul that it might reach them through the 
wall and prove that title to be their equal 
that the music in me claimed. Many a 
year it took me before I got any real share 
of their pie, and therefore I cannot help 

87 



GEORGE MOORE 



admiring the daring with which Mr. Moore 
at once dashed for Ireland and secured his 
portion. 

There was something pathetic in Mr. 
Moore's return to his native land. Her son 
who had made himself famous in France 
and England returning to build up her 
fortune with his fame and to swagger a 
little becomingly in his benevolence. And 
Dublin — Dublin who cares for none of Ire- 
land's sons famous or infamous, except 
those who stand her drinks — killed no fatted 
calf for her prodigal, never even knew of 
his return ; worse still, never even knew he 
had been away. But Mr. Moore, who had 
mined for himself out of his own reluctant 
bowels a career and a fame, was not to be 
daunted by any neglect or contempt in 
Dublin from shouldering his way in and 
arranging his pieces on a stage of his own 
making. 

In those first years of the century it seemed 
to us in Ireland as if not only were our own 
geese, beloved and wild, returning to us, 
but tame geese, not our own, were flocking 
hither also. A queen of England who had 
not set foot in our island for a generation, 
led the fashion. One who when she was 
young and girded herself, walking whither 
she would, walked not hither ; but who, 
when she was old, and another girded her, 
bringing her whither she would not, was 

88 



GEORGE MOORE 



borne amongst us. And many English people 
at that time were displaying on their family 
trees before admiring circles, Irish grand- 
mothers who had hitherto shared the cup- 
board with other family skeletons. The 
English are a simple folk and one cannot be 
hard upon them. On such simple lines the 
gods build up great nations. 

Dublin at the time Mr. Moore came here 
was a very pleasant place to live in. It 
had all the ingredients of an agreeable 
literary society and a number of persons 
interested in art or literature or humanity 
either lived here or made the city frequent 
visits. George Moore said of Dublin that its 
" acoustic properties were perfect," so that 
no jest, be it whispered ever so softly in 
the closet, fails to be heard on the remotest 
house-top. It is an ideal home for clever 
talkers. John Butler Yeats uprooted his 
family from London where they had been 
settled for some years and returned here to 
live. In his studio in Stephen's Green he 
painted and talked all day long. Mr. Yeats 
brought his two daughters, distinguished in 
mind as are all the Yeats family, sharing 
with their father the gift — made memorable 
by him in his portraits of women — of dis- 
covering beautiful and lovable character- 
istics in their friends. John Butler Yeats 
had the rare quality that he not only made 
his women pretty, any artist can do that, 

89 



GEORGE MOORE 



but he made them lovable, manifesting 
some interior beauty in their souls. Incom- 
parable executants like Sargent and, William 
Orpen have not this faculty ; they exhibit 
all a woman's character, but no spiritual 
life looks out of the faces that are so superbly 
drawn. Nathaniel Hone lived here, the last 
survivor of the Barbizon School, an old 
associate of Corot and Millet, full of reminis- 
cences of famous men who seem to us to 
belong to the classical history of art and 
himself the most distinguished landscape 
painter Ireland ever produced, with a massive 
power of building up the architecture of a 
landscape, which is rare even amongst the 
greatest painters. Another attractive per- 
sonality in Dublin at that time was Walter 
Osborne, the artist, a most competent crafts- 
man, a charming companion and lovable 
man whose early death was a great loss to 
Ireland. John Hughes lived in Dublin 
then, a sculptor of real talent and still more 
attractive by his personality, capable of 
pungent remarks, absolutely free in his 
mind. Unfortunately for himself he drew 
upon him Mr. Moore's voracious literary 
eye, and he made him the Rodney of " The 
Untilled Field." I do not know whether it 
is due to this exploitation of his personality 
that Mr. Hughes decided to live in Paris 
evermore. William Orpen was also a fre- 
quent visitor to Dublin, as free as John 

90 



GEORGE MOORE 



Hughes in his mind and the most devoted 
slave of the brush that ever came out of 
Ireland. While here he painted one of the 
innumerable portraits of the subject of this 
monogram. His slavery to his tools no 
doubt made him the master of his art that 
he is at present. Sometimes Jack Yeats 
came here, whimsical and kindly, most 
winning of all the Yeats ; turning by his 
genius peasants, farmers, tinkers, and the 
monstrosities of the shows into symbolic 
images. That nothing might be lacking in 
the attractiveness of the city of Dublin 
to a man of Moore's temperament, there 
flashed across it the most brilliant con- 
noisseur of modern times, the generous, pub- 
lic-spirited, ever-to-be-lamented Sir Hugh 
Lane. 

Mr. Moore's younger brother. Colonel 
Maurice Moore, often visited Dubhn in those 
days. He has a great deal of the family 
literary talent and a power of pungent 
speech which shows that if he had not been 
a soldier he might have attained a consider- 
able reputation as a writer. Mr. Moore has 
painted his brother skilfully and merci- 
lessly in the Trilogy, it might not be seemly 
for one brother to retort on the other by a 
counter portrait, but as far as insight into 
character is concerned, Maurice Moore rather 
than myself should have been chosen to 
write this epilogue on George Moore's literary 

91 



GEORGE MOORE 



career. For those who know Colonel Moore 
only through the pages of the Trilogy it 
may be well to state, on George Moore's 
private admission, to which we have already 
referred, that Maurice has always behaved 
like a gentleman. But Maurice Moore is 
more than that. He is a distinguished soldier 
who was the chief military organiser of the 
National Volunteers, a force which Sir 
Matthew Nathan states attained a member- 
ship of 160,000. He is a good Irishman, 
with the fixed principles which are more 
readily appreciated by the public than the 
fluent ones possessed by his brother George. 
An artist who takes or drops his principles 
on their literary value is very disconcerting 
to the ordinary citizen. It is certainly dis- 
composing to find a man who a year ago 
was enthusiastic about some idea turning a 
cold shoulder upon it because it has served 
his purpose as an artist and there is no more 
copy in it. Maurice Moore's principles were 
not those of an artist but those of a patriot. 
From the very fine book he wrote about his 
father we gather that Colonel Maurice Moore 
inherits from him that public honesty which 
was, I think, George Henry Moore's greatest 
gift to the politics of his generation. George 
Henry Moore possessed a fine honesty and 
frankness which he bequeathed to his sons 
— the honesty to Maurice, the frankness to 
George. 

92 



GEORGE MOORE 



Douglas Hyde, whose eloquent tongue 
could coax the Gaelic off the bushes, was 
continually here, the brain and will of the 
Gaelic League. There were Lady Gregory 
and William Butler Yeats, an Orpheus who 
drew that Eurydice out of the Llades of 
Irish landlordism — strange that his music 
should also have attracted so unlikely a 
ghost as Mr. Moore. 

Professor Mahaffy lived here. When Mr. 
Moore came first to Dublin he was in- 
veigled by a fierce environment of Gaels into 
an attack on Professor Mahaffy, which he 
bitterly regretted a short time after it was 
made on hearing that Professor Mahaffy 
had once said that " Catholicism was essen- 
tially the religion of the lower classes." 
" What a friend he would have been," said 
Mr. Moore. Professor Tyrrell, with a wit 
polished in the classic manner, lived here; 
and there was also Professor Edward Dow- 
den, an excellent critic of literature which 
had become a classic, but, like most critics 
a rather more dubious commentator on 
his contemporaries ; a really distinguished 
mind but without much sympathy for 
intellectual revivals in his own country. 
They seemed to him revolutionary, and he 
compared his attitude to them to Burke's 
attitude to the French Revolution, and 
seemed rather to take a pride in acknow- 
ledging that he was the solitary Irish 

93 



GEORGE MOORE 



intellectual on the side of the stupid 
people. 

Edward Martyn was frequently in Dublin 
then, interested in all that made for beauty 
in his country. His cousin George Moore, 
in the Trilogy has fashioned him into a sort 
of scapegoat for his own personal antipa- 
thies, castigating him for sins he never 
sinned. The real Martyn, who hates a 
draught as he hates the devil, held his 
ground bluffly against all the ill-winds that 
cousinly venom could direct against him, 
using the consolations of a religion he had 
fashioned for himself out of music and the 
drama. He comes out of the adversity of 
the Trilogy triumphantly ; a figure whom 
one regards with auction. " Dear Edward " 
was clever enough to deprive George Moore 
of the triumph of knowing what his victim 
thought of his own portrait, for he steadily 
refused to read the Trilogy, saying : " George 
is a pleasant fellow to meet, and if I read the 
book I might not be able to meet him again." 
" Dear Edward " is dear to his friends, not 
as he is dear to the malicious literary affec- 
tion of Mr. Moore, but for his straightfor- 
ward and honest humanity, and in spite of 
Mr. Moore's malicious portrait, I am certain 
there is no one living for whom he has so 
sincere an affection as for Edward Martjm. 
Mr. Moore has always bestowed his respect 
on those who have the courage to disagree 

94 



GEORGE MOORE 



with him, and anybody who has seen Mr. 
Moore on the war trail for a scalp knows it 
requires uncommon courage to do so. Sir 
Horace Plunkett was in Dublin at that 
time, the puzzle of the politicians, none of 
whom have any politics at all but supply 
this deficiency on the one side by prejudices, 
on the other by public-houses. There was 
also Mr. Rolleston, who should have been a 
scholar but for his entanglement in an 
economic movement ; with an elasticity of 
temperament which caused him at his first 
contact with Irish Nationality to bound into 
Fenianism and from thence to rebound into 
an Imperialism that carried him across the 
sea to become permanently an Englishman. 
Yet I feel that the man who gave us the 
beautiful words of a poem like " The Dead 
at Clonmacnoise," pervading it with the 
honey breath of midland Ireland, deserved 
more than the punctured Messiahship ac- 
corded him by Mr. Moore. " M " was here 
—whom reviewers in continually increasing 
numbers charge with being a poet, a painter, 
and an economist, tracing his career from 
the Esplanade at Bray, where he preached 
the Ancient Gods of Ireland, through the 
counting-house to the bicycle whereon he 
roamed Ireland organising co-operative 
societies, and into the editorial chair of the 
Irish Homestead ; but who, in spite of this 
weight of evidence against him, remains a 

95 



GEORGE MOORE 



friendly human being who loves a laugh 
even at his own expense, and who would be 
surprised and probably annoyed if he knew 
that there are some who believe that in 
Ireland all roads lead to "^"! William 
Butler Yeats came here, a poet with a more 
exquisite craft in the use of words than any 
living poet, and — the noblest figure of them 
all — a solitary, unconcerned with any move- 
ment, but himself an incarnation of the soul 
of Ireland — Standish O'Grady. A name 
almost unknown across the Channel, and 
often confused with his cousin Standish 
Hayes O'Grady, the Gaelic scholar. In the 
" Bardic History of Ireland," he opened 
with a heroic gesture the doors which re- 
vealed to us in Ireland the giant brood of 
the Red Branch Knights and the Fianna. 
Though a prose writer, he may be called 
the last of the bards, a true comrade of 
Homer. 

Every now and then Synge would loom 
up here, saying little and obviously not at 
home in cities and much more a companion 
of the Arran peasant than of the Dublin 
literary folk. 

Among other literary persons there were 
John Eglinton, so affectionately referred to 
in the Trilogy ; Richard Irvine Best, who 
turned from an original love of Pater and 
Wilde and other decadent exquisites to 
become a genuine scholar and editor of 

96 



GEORGE MOORE 



ancient Irish texts ; Oliver Gogarty, who 
had but just nipped the wires of the cham- 
pagne of his wit and sprayed a pungent 
froth around him. 

The infinite variety of Dubhn Hfe brought 
also a dramatic interest which must be dear 
to an actor such as Mr. Moore. This interest 
in the theatre brought him into contact 
with Frank Fay, who had invented a method 
of teaching actors to speak beautifully, an 
art which the Abbey Theatre has not yet 
lost, and his brother Willie Fay, an actor 
comparable in his own range to a James 
Weleh, who made a most perfect study of 
'' The Playboy of the Western World " and 
who could — ^such was his strangely com- 
pounded character — have explained to you 
the ethics of Epictetus or the esoteric signifi- 
cance of the memoirs of the Comte de 
Gabalis. 

At a further period of Mr. Moore's stay 
in Dublin Seumas O'Sullivan, Padraic Colum, 
and later on James Stephens, began to be 
prominent, and one cannot pass from this 
company without mentioning Mr. Commis- 
sioner Bailey, clever, discriminating, at 
whose hospitable house anything that 
painted, sang, composed, or acted was sure 
of a welcome. 

With all these colours on his palette, Mr. 
Moore in the end selected for his picture 
the most permanent tints, dipping his 

G 97 



GEORGE MOORE 



brush often in the luscious human com- 
pound of T. P. Gill ; W. B. Yeats, and " ^," 
attracted by their brilliant colouring, while 
his brother Maurice supplied the sombre 
tones. 



98 



XIII 

All these diverse persons were to be found 
in Dublin, for the most part hating each 
other like poison, but shortly " cross as an 
armful of cats," and with or without their 
consent to be drawn together in Mr. Moore's 
all-embracing literary affection. To a 
novelist a society such as this Irish one was 
infinitely attractive. In Ireland humanity 
develops in its natural forms, it is like 
virgin forest, untamed, untrained, uncivilised, 
there has been no settled social order to 
constrain its growth. The difference be- 
tween society in England and Ireland seems 
to me to be as the difference between wild 
forest and forest scientifically planted by a 
state forester. The English novelists since 
Dickens days have to grub very far below 
surfaces to find any difierentiation in their 
characters. The tall, clean, well-set-up 
" God's Englishman " has become a national 
ideal. Irish Society has no such minted 
ideal and it is unlucky in its false coinage, 
aping with equal unhappiness what is un- 
real in English as well as in Irish character. 
The natural Irishman is then an orgy of 
temperament, very often a delightful being, 



GEORGE MOORE 



because — Mr. Bernard Shaw must pardon 
me — I think a choicer portion of wits fell 
to this small island than to its more roomy 
companion, though the culture that has 
been a good friend to our companion, we 
to our great hurt have scorned. It is not 
unlikely that it is the consciousness of un- 
trammelled temperament that makes an 
Irishman so desirous of that pigeonhole 
retreat for his soul to which I have referred 
in another chapter, so unhappy when he has 
found it, and so confident that it is good for 
all other Irishmen and so determined to 
place them there. 

At the time of Mr. Moore's return to 
Dublin some of the group of intellectuals 
whom I have described were gravitating 
towards the drama. The story of the in- 
tellectual revival in drama in Ireland has 
been told so often and with such canonical 
authority that to begin to disentangle truth 
from falsehood now would be a thankless 
task and one outside the scope of this book. 
It is sufficient for my purpose here that I 
give the honour of the inception of the idea 
of a school of Irish actors where the honour 
is due, to the brothers Frank and William 
Fay. While Mr. Yeats, not himself naturally 
a dramatist, turned the thoughts of most of 
his literary contemporaries in Ireland into 
the writing of plays, the Fay brothers were 
the avatars of a new creed in Irish acting. 

100 



GEORGE MOORE 



They laboured at their uncommon task 
each evening when the common labour of 
the day was done, Frank with his passion 
for beauty in speech instructing his dis- 
ciples, young men and women workers such 
as he himself, and Willie, holding the little 
company together by his genius as an actor. 
Not yet, however, had the temple been 
built that, like so many other fanes, should 
smother the religion it sought to shelter, 
and Yeats' " Countess Cathleen " had to 
content itself with English actors, and when 
the dual play, Yeats' and Moore's " Dermiud 
and Grania " was evolved, the Benson com- 
pany presented it on the boards in Dublin. 

The writing of this play was in itself a 
play. The conjunction of such planetary 
bodies as Yeats and Moore, who should have 
been by nature always in opposition, was a 
portent in the literary heaven. Our Yeats, 
curved and spiral, a Celtic wonder in mind, 
at home in the magical regions of Tirnanoge 
— where are land and water, sowing and 
reaping but as the heart desires them— and 
Moore, the bantling of Mayo and Mont- 
martre, concerning himself too often with 
what Saintsbury calls the " fie-fie " side of 
the naturalism whose by-product he was. 
What an alliance ! Literary Dublin sought 
in the play with intense interest for the 
footmarks of the writers and when it 
found God Angus described as " A ragged 

101 



GEORGE MOORE 



old man wandering along the mountains 
prodding a boar," it cried " Lo Yeats " 
and behold it was Moore, and coming on 
the description of Conan scratching his head 
and complaining of lice it said " Lo 
Moore " and behold it was Yeats. Yeats 
had come to the collaboration determined 
to be substantial and material like Moore. 
Moore had resolved to rise to the heaven 
of the picturesque and beautiful to meet 
Yeats. They had passed each other on the 
journey. The lice came out of Mr. Yeats' 
fancy and the Sidhe out of Mr. Moore's. 

Mr. Moore was ever a hero-worshipper, and 
when Yeats, during the writing of the play, 
made such strange suggestions as that the 
first act should be horizontal, the second 
perpendicular, and the third circular, Mr. 
Moore was puzzled, but reverent. Walking 
under his apple trees in Ely Place he cogi- 
tated. " The first act — Grania, the nurse, 
etc. Is that horizontal ? Yes, surely that 
must be horizontal." Going on to the second 
act, the question, " What is perpendicular in 
drama ? " struck a dumb note in his mind, 
and that mind failed altogether when he 
came to consider the circular in relation to 
the third act. This story and the fact that 
he accepted from Mr. Yeats a list of words 
that must not be used because they had 
been used in literature too much already, 
and that he even contemplated writing his 

102 



GEORGE MOORE 



part of the play in French, Lady Gregory 
to translate it into English for Yeats to 
work on, show in a man so full of vanity 
and egoism as Mr. Moore an extraordinary 
power of abasing himself before one whom 
he regarded as a master in the guild of litera- 
ture. We can never be quite certain that 
this worship was altogether genuine. We 
continually find in Mr. Moore a desire to 
lose himself in some worship. In Mr. 
Yeats, in Gaelic, in Protestantism, but we 
always suspect that at the back of his 
mind he was well aware that he could never 
unfasten himself from his own moorings 
and that he had always this feeling, " If I 
cannot lose myself I shall at least not lose 
art, and in the end it all produces copy." 
The story of the spoliation of Edward 
Martyn in " The Bending of the Bough " 
has been told with absolute frankness by 
Mr. Moore in the Trilogy. I should have 
more confidence in the shame for the theft 
that he expresses there if he had not used 
the shame as he uses every asset of emotion 
he possesses for literary purposes. Edward 
Martyn's genuine dramatic talent proved in 
" The Heather Field " was a temptation to 
a born literary bandit like Mr. Moore, who 
prides himself on yielding to temptation, 
and in alliance with Mr. Yeats, always an 
unfortunate conjunction, Edward Martyn's 
play was tortured from its original inten- 

103 



GEORGE MOORE 



tion and became no play at all, but a 
dramatic experiment doomed to failure. 
Mr. Moore would fain have captured also 
Miss Alice Milligan's " Last Feast of the 
Fianna," but she defended it " like a little 
white Persian cat spitting at him from the 
corner," as he himself described her ; very 
wisely trusting to her own talents, her con- 
fidence being justified in the result. 

After "The Bending of the Bough," Mr. 
Moore broke up his association with Irish 
drama and with Mr. Yeats, and looked round 
for other partners. He came to Ireland 
with, I think, a sincere belief in the literary 
potencies implicit in the Gaelic League. He 
may have cherished a faint ambition to 
learn the language, but as all his friends 
tell us it took him many years to acquire 
any facility even in English, he was no 
doubt deterred from the more complex 
tongue of the Gael. But he was willing to 
learn Gaelic vicariously, through his nephews, 
and he was very firm in his determination 
that they should miss none of the accents 
and elisions of the wiliest speech in Europe. 
But though he did not learn Irish he felt 
that Irish had much to learn from him, and 
he placed at the disposal of the Gaelic 
League the name and fame and talents of a 
great English novelist and the best-paid 
writer upon art of his generation. He wrote 
'' The Untilled Field " that Gaelic Ireland 

104 



GEORGE MOORE 



might feel its way into modern literature, 
and no doubt if he had been more careful 
of Irish susceptibilities some small seed of 
naturalism might have fructified in Irish 
soil, which was not unkindly just then to 
the reception of new influences. He had 
lived too long out of Ireland to realise that 
a Gaelic public has the tenderest toes. It 
has in fact cultivated its susceptibilities into 
a fine art, believing that its salvation lay 
in them ; Moore's lightest footstep pro- 
duced anguish. Causes in Ireland are strange 
creatures, tender and fierce ; many of them 
die in childhood or perhaps the world might 
harden them. The Gaelic League, an ador- 
able cause for an Irishman, has not escaped 
this touchiness. Had it not possessed a 
leader who like Douglas Hyde knew no 
fear, it too had died in infancy. But his 
splendid courage swung it through the perils 
of infancy and adolescence ; the pity is that 
in its most freakish age it developed an ill- 
timed and ill-directed boldness and dis- 
pensed with the leadership of a man of 
genius in whom lay its only hope of cap- 
turing all Ireland. I sometimes wonder if 
anything now remains for what was, without 
question, at one time one of the biggest 
possibilities in Irish life, but a gradual 
sinking back into that academic stage which 
in a language precedes decay and death. 
In Ireland more perhaps than in other 

105 



GEORGE MOORE 



places, a movement needs a man. " The 
Untilled Field " even in a Gaelic translation 
did not capture Gaelic Ireland. Though 
there was something in its mood that might 
have tempted Gaels, I am not surprised at 
its failure. Mr. Moore's meat for babes con- 
tained some elements that might have taxed 
stomachs inured to stronger diet than any 
Gaelic Leaguer ever encountered. So like 
another of his name, " There was trouble 
on George, Ireland would not do his business 
for him," and the Gaelic League, like others 
of his Irish aspirations, went into the melt- 
ing pot of the Trilogy. 



106 



XIV 

Mr. Moore after this, I think, rested from 
movements and became in more than one 
sense in Dublin a society entertainer. There 
has always been in him a trace of the Donny- 
brook Fair Irishman and in his relations 
with society in Dublin these characteristics 
frequently appear. The following episode 
of the green hall door illustrates this : 
There are certain people in Dublin the desire 
to shock whom must have been irresistible 
to one of Mr. Moore's temperament, for 
Dublin has other and more inexcusable 
susceptibilities than those of Gaelic Leaguers. 
There are respectable Irish people who have 
a morbid horror of anything they consider 
" unsound " either in religion or politics. 
These persons are often, though by no 
means always, our Protestants and Tories, 
who could better pardon open immoralities 
than the " unsoundness " I speak of. I 
feel quite sure that these persons thought 
Mr. Moore a very bad man, but they might 
have winked at his badness alone— robust 
virtue is ever tender to robust vice— but 
there was an element in Mr. Moore's badness 
which made it unpardonable in the eyes of 
true blue Protestant Tories— he truckled 

107 



GEORGE MOORE 



with Fenianism. The more a movement in 
Ireland proclaims itself non-political and 
non-sectarian, the more your true blue of 
every section suspects it. To be a Gaelic 
Leaguer was to be a Fenian, and when such 
a one painted his hall door in the Fenian 
colour green, what was this but an open 
flaunting of his abominable sympathies in a 
respectable neighbourhood. All Ely Place 
rebelled, letters were written by neighbours 
to his landlord. The occasion was one after 
his own heart and Mr. Moore rushed into 
the fray with a letter to his landlord, which, 
I am told, ran somewhat as follows : Mr. 
Moore said he was glad his neighbours had 
complained first about him because he had 
grave complaints to make of their conduct, 
only being a peaceable man he did not wish 
to say anything; but now that they had 
begun the attack, he would say that his 
neighbours did not clean their chimneys 
and that large smuts the size of sixpenny 
pieces floated through his windows and on 
to his clean doorstep. His neighbours also 
kept dogs which they beat with sticks, and 
these dogs howled, which was distressing to 
a man of humane feelings. The young 
ladies, his neighbours, were noisy persons 
who rode their bicycles round and round 
before his door, ringing their bells and look- 
ing at his hall door, which they objected 
to, and into his windows, which he objected 

108 



GEORGE MOORE 



to. But he would let that pass and come to 
the matter of the hall door. He would like 
to remind his landlord that he was George 
Moore, whose opinion on matters of taste 
was more highly paid than that of any other 
person in these islands, and he was not 
accustomed to find his opinion on such 
matters disputed. But he would let that 
pass also ; he was a peaceable person and 
was willing to agree on a new colour for the 
hall door after mutual consultation. But 
he would like to remind them that the green 
hall door was the key-note of the melody 
of colour in the whole house, and the colour 
prepared one for the harmonies which un- 
folded room by room. As his landlord was 
a practical business man he would know that 
such harmonies were expensive things, but 
still for the sake of peace he was prepared 
to evolve a fresh harmony on a new key- 
note, the landlord of course bearing the 
expense. He did not know which of his 
neighbours had made the complaint, so he 
was sending copies of the letter to all, and 
if they were not satisfied he would write to 
the Press and ask the public to judge between 
his green hall door and the dirty white of the 
hall doors of his neighbours. Mr. Moore's in- 
vitation was not, as we may imagine, accepted 
— and his hall door remained an oasis of ten- 
der green in the desert of Ely Place. 

On another occasion, to which I have 
109 



GEORGE MOORE 



referred in an earlier chapter, Mr. Moore's 
cook served him with an unsuccessful ome- 
lette. Mr. Moore had often explained to his 
friends that his tastes in food were very 
simple, that just as Whistler had narrowed 
down his colours to a couple of tones, so he 
had narrowed down his carnal appetites to 
a couple of dishes — an omelette — but it 
must be properly made, a chop — but it 
must be properly cooked. Six cooks within 
a fortnight failed to minister to this modest 
appetite, and Mr. Moore's indignation in all 
probability rose higher and higher at suc- 
cessive failures, till it came to pass that the 
last of the six went out to get a policeman to 
protect her from a flood of artistic expos- 
tulation with her cooking wherewith Mr. 
Moore threatened to engulf her. Mr. Moore 
met the policeman on the doorstep, took 
him by the arm and dragged him into the 
dining-room, pointed to the omelette and 
asked in a tragic voice, " Am I to be com- 
pelled by law to eat this ? " That his tastes 
were really modest is shown by the fact 
that the seventh cook proved capable of 
evoking from her materials the exact tones 
required by Mr. Moore, and she remained 
with him ten or twelve years. There is a 
distinction between flavours, and as Walter 
Pater, Mr. Moore's ancient master in the 
art of writing, says, " To miss the sense of 
distinction is to miss success in life." 

110 



GEORGE MOORE 



The conversion of George Moore to religion 
was an event which interested the Dubhn 
that goes to the Abbey Theatre and enjoys 
good acting and literary art, for the con- 
version was conceived in the mood of light 
comedy. It was reported that the ecclesi- 
astical authorities at Maynooth, on the 
occasion of the late King's visit there, 
decorated that seat of divinity with the 
King's racing colours. This may or may not 
have been so, but at the moment the account 
appeared, religion came to George Moore. 
His conversion was as instantaneous as 
St. Paul's, and no doubt his experiences en- 
abled him later on to understand the Apostle 
who is the hero of "The Brook Kerith." 
It is possible that the light which fell from 
Heaven on Moore was in the nature of a 
literary inspiration, and he saw as in a 
vision the book which he, a Messiah, should 
write about an Apostle. " Ave, Salve and 
Vale " occupied him at the moment and it 
was needful that ''The Brook Kerith" 
should be postponed for a few years. But 
the wise litterateur while working at one 
book will prepare his life for the next and 
will be collecting experiences. So George 
Moore as a prologue to the comedy of his 
religion, at once wrote to the papers and 
announced his intended reception into the 
Protestant communion as a protest against 
the decoration of Maynooth with King 

111 



GEORGE MOORE 



Edward's racing colours. The chorus in 
Dublin, in a mood rightly related to the 
mind of the protagonist, commented gaily 
upon the spiritual state of one whose pro- 
test against a King took the surprising form 
of adopting the religion of that King against 
whom he protested. Mr. Moore desired 
complete initiation into the mysteries of his 
new faith. He had his revelation, but 
revelation has to be reconciled to human 
reason, and so he went to the Archbishop of 
Dublin demanding as candidate the rites of 
initiation. The Archbishop was wiser than 
he looked, and referred Mr. Moore to the 
rector of his parish, and so probably escaped 
an immortality, which I am certain he 
would not have desired, in the pages of the 
Trilogy. The Archbishop made the escape 
of his life, for it was suggested by the 
chorus that Mr. Moore was trying to kill 
two birds with the one stone. He hoped to 
destroy one religion by explaining his reasons 
for leaving it and another by explaining his 
reasons for joining it. 

His preference for Protestantism was based 
on the belief that Protestant clergymen were 
men of the world. This view he explained 
to " ^," who expostulated with him for 
carrying his joke too far, and who said 
Moore would hurt the feelings of men who 
were really sincere and pious. " Oh no, 
' M,' you don't understand ; these men are 

112 



GEORGE MOORE 



men of the world." '' But I tell you, Moore, 
that I know many of these men and they are 
truly sincere and believe what they preach, 
and they will ask you to pray, Moore, to go 
down on your knees, Moore, things you 
have never done in your life, and you will 
feel very much out of place." " Oh no, 
' JE,^ you don't understand ; these are men 
of the world, they understand perfectly." 
"Well, I warn you," said " ^," and departed. 
After a week had elapsed " ^ " met Mr. 
Moore and asked him about the initiation. 
" Well," said Moore, " what you said nearly 
burst up the whole thing. When the clergy- 
man came I did not wish to appear to be 
taken in too easily and I worked up a few 
remaining scruples, fenced for a while and 
finally announced my scruples as conquered, 
and myself ready to be received into the 
fold. Then the clergyman said, ' Let us have 
a prayer,' and I remembered your words 
and saw your face looking at me and I 
burst out laughing. When I saw the horri- 
fied look in the clergyman's face I realised 
it was all up unless I could convince him 
that it was hysteria, and I clasped my 
hands together and said, ' Oh, you don't 
realise how strange all this appears to 
me to be. I feel like a little child that 
has lost its way on a long road and at last 
sees its father,' and I, folding my hands 
anew, began ' Our Father.' I took the wind 

H 113 



GEORGE MOORE 



out of his sails that way, for he had to join 
in, but he got in two Httle prayers on his 
own account afterwards, and very nice little 
prayers they were too." 

This little child in religion had the en- 
thusiasm of the newly converted. He has 
told us how he began to read the Bible for 
the first time, and he went so far as to read 
the Lessons in a country church in England 
where he was on a visit. " I believe in 
Protestantism," he said to " ^," "1 don't 
mind what anybody thinks . ' ' Then he added, 
looking slyly at "" ^," as an afterthought : 
" I don't think I could go on reading the 
Lessons if Mallock came into the church." 

When Ireland was rent in two over the 
prospect of Home Rule, Mr. Moore trailed 
not a red herring, but a rarer fish across its 
path when he informed his country, through 
the contentious columns of the Irish Times, 
that in the restaurant of one Henri in Paris 
he had eaten a grey mullet. The bones of 
that mullet, to be sure, stuck in Ireland's 
throat, but it was still articulate enough to 
talk, and for days every shade of religion and 
politics in the country told the Irish Times 
what it thought of mullet and how often it 
had eaten it in every colour from grey to 
scarlet. Besides the mullet matter, Mr. 
Moore trailed his coat in letters to the 
papers on every variety of subject, irrelevant 
if possible to any event or emotion of the 

114 



GEORGE MOORE 



day, and but seldom trailed it in vain. 
Someone was always found to respond to 
the invitation, and Dublin waxed merry 
over the encounters, and learned to like 
Mr. Moore more in his character of jester 
than of patriot ; so pleasantly did he, like 
Bottom, put an ass's head upon him and 
gambol in our walks. 



115 



XV 

Mr. Moore having written a book in 
which he said his farewells to Dublin with 
all the literary skill at his command, could 
hardly remain here when the book was 
published. So he, to whom sacrifice had 
become the chief ceremonial of his religion 
as an artist, tore himself away from a charm- 
ing house and a lively company of agreeable 
friends, exchanging the soft clean airs of 
Dublin for stuffy Pimlico where is distilled 
in its crudest form that mixture of hot 
rubber and petrol fumes that makes all the 
Londoners know of atmosphere. Mr. 
Moore's contributions to literature since 
his return to London have been lamentable. 
Casual articles in newspapers on such sub- 
jects as whistling for taxicabs, politics and 
barking dogs. I do not, I confess, think 
much of Mr. Moore's pronouncements on 
the last subject, and but that I am committed 
to a statement of Mr. Moore as an Irishman, 
his preoccupation with this matter would 
make me suspect him of an English ancestry. 
I have often been struck by the sensitive- 
ness of elderly military and naval English- 
men in the matter of the dogs' protesting 

116 



GEORGE MOORE 



voice. Any barking that is to be done in 
England they want to do themselves. 

In politics Mr. Moore ranges himself 
naturally with God and the Daily Mail on 
the side of the big battalions, or, as they 
view it through the larger other end of their 
mental opera glasses, the side of the small 
nationalities. Mr. Moore's make-up, how- 
ever, is not that of the politician, and one 
is not surprised to find him an echo. The 
labour of his mind is all on the side of per- 
sonal expression, and he has none of the 
intellectual adroitness that enables the poli- 
tician to identify his own cause with the 
cause of humanity. Mr. Moore is very 
clear about his own cause and never hesi- 
tates to hustle other causes off the course. 
He is primitive, indeed, infantile man, as 
sure of himself as the baby is. He has 
escaped all that sophistication of altruism 
wherewith the guardians of our youth so 
early confound our confidence in ourselves. 
Masculine character, as it appears to the 
feminine mind weary with wisdom from its 
age-long researches, seldom gets beyond 
the boyhood stage, and our Peter Pans are 
dear to us, but Mr. Moore has never got 
beyond babyhood in his character, and few 
women can have known him long without that 
desire to slap him that is the normal woman's 
attitude towards an aggravating baby, let 
the sentimentalists say what they will. 

117 



GEORGE MOORE 



I do not find Mr. Moore's essays in the 
Press in England as amusing as his essays 
here. Your EngHshman being a born senti- 
mentahst, hke his German forefathers, will 
accept no statement of life that is not 
practical. To get a footing in an English 
paper Mr. Moore was constrained to link 
himself on to such obvious nuisances as 
taxi whistling fiends, and barking dogs. 
Such flinty matters can kindle a spark of 
rage, but out of them no pleasant glow of 
humour comes. Ireland, sure of its prac- 
ticality, and unutterably weary of it, de- 
mands continual imaginative statements of 
life. The colour of a hall door, the juxta- 
position of a policeman and an omelette, 
the mythical flavour of a mythical mullet, 
mythically eaten in a French restaurant, 
such things delight us, as a way of escape 
from the harsh constraint of our practical 
temperament. Dr. Mahaffy, the Provost of 
Dublin University, is more concerned that 
his girl students should not wear pink blouses 
than that the course of study provided by 
his college should be of the slightest in- 
tellectual advantage to them, and all Dublin 
is with him in a hearty appreciation of his 
attitude and does not care a hang for college 
courses. The merchants of Belfast, owners 
of as fine businesses as any in the world, 
were happier running guns illicitly than they 
ever were in reading bulky balance sheets. 

118 



GEORGE MOORE 



Your Englishman, conscious of his danger 
on the sentimental side of his nature, is, in 
common with his Teuton relative, armouring 
himself on that side more heavily day by 
day. I need not talk to Irishmen of their 
danger in following their practical bent, we 
—and England also— know it very well. 
Whether we are right in regarding life as a 
schoolmaster with a rod in pickle for tempera- 
ment or whether we are wrong, it is perhaps 
fortunate for literature, and it is certainly 
luck for the student of Mr. Moore's wayward 
character, that he never went to school. 

Mr. Moore is safely installed in London 
now, he has his house and furniture, mahog- 
any doors and pictures and all the burdens 
that man sets himself to accumulate in his 
passage through time. He has the occasional 
society of Mr. Tonks and Mr. Steer to whet 
his appetite for discussion on art. His ex- 
cursions into print have not, I fancy, 
afforded him much amusement, for irrelevant 
as such trifling was in the midst of an agon- 
ising war, they were too much in the key of 
English life to relieve the boredom of a 
nature such as Mr. Moore's, which loves to 
strike a discord. I do not feel that Mr. 
Moore is as at home in the picture in his 
London life as he was in Dublin. His opera 
hat fits in there, no doubt, and his bull-in- 
the-china-shop truthfulness, which he was 
diplomatic enough to replace in Dublin by 

119 



GEORGE MOORE 



a more subtle and edged sincerity, probably 
serves him well in a country where a Bull is 
the popular hero. He has also in cold storage 
in his nature, like most Anglo-Irish people, 
an appreciation of the well-oiled English 
mechanism of life. Yet for all this I hardly 
think that one who has never written Finis 
after any chapter in his life has put the last 
seal on his Irish Chapter. I am the more 
inclined to think this because there were 
wafted to us here in Dublin from time to 
time scraps of his latest book " The Brook 
Kerith," and although he has made a 
pilgrimage to the Holy Land since he left 
us the tales borne to me bring airs from Ely 
Place. Mr. Moore came to Ireland in search 
of a Messiah, and though having tried to fit 
the part to each of his friends here and 
finding they failed him in some essential 
characteristic, he cast himself for it, he can- 
not have been satisfied with his own pre- 
sentation of the part, for in " The Brook 
Kerith," he starts the quest anew. The 
story of the successor to the Messiahship 
has not yet leaked out, but Mr. Moore 
presents us with an apostle who believes 
that the new religion will not succeed unless 
it is associated with a language revival ; 
and another apostle who talks about style, 
pondering over his Epistles to his followers 
with a literary anxiety as keen as Mr. 
Yeats' ! I believe it was once said of Mr. 

120 



GEORGE MOORE 



Moore by a member of his family that he 
would end his days as a monk, and it is 
certainly true that his later writings show 
the attraction of religion drawing him closer 
and closer. It seems, however, to be an 
attraction of repulsion and to consist rather 
in renunciations than confessions of faith. 
In Dublin he renounced St. Peter. In 
"The Brook Kerith " he confesses St. Paul; 
but doubtless we shall have a renunciation 
there also. I think Mr. Moore's conten- 
tion that his family is of Protestant origin 
must have some truth in it, for he has a 
good deal of the Protestant protest against 
faith in any shape or form. So strong is 
Mr. Moore's protest against all that relates 
to the See of Peter, that I believe amongst 
the many endings he proposed for his book 
he had almost chosen the following : " You 
know," he is reported to have said to a 
friend, " the ordinary legend of the martyr- 
dom of St. Paul I discard as invented by a 
Church who wanted a long background of 
martyrs to justify any martyrdoms she 
herself should inflict. I intend to bring St. 
Paul in his old age to Spain, where he gradu- 
ally fades away surrounded by his disciples. 
At the very last he hears once more the 
Voice he heard on the way to Damascus, 
and a light penetrates him with a vision of 
futurity and he sees with horror all that his 
religion is bringing on the world. He sees 

121 



GEORGE MOORE 



the Inquisition in Spain and Maynooth in 
Ireland, and he dies crying with all the 
ferocity peculiar to the Pauline nature, " To 
hell with the Pope ! " 

Mr. Moore is too good an artist to disfigure 
his book with this freakish story, and too 
much of an imp not to whisper it in some 
friend's ear with a confidence which has 
certainly not been misplaced in the perfect 
acoustic properties of Dublin. 



122 



XVI 

A MAN who suffered so much for religion as 
actually to submit to pray and be prayed 
over would not shrink from further sacrifices, 
and after " Ave, Salve and Vale " was com- 
pleted the idea of writing a story about 
St. Paul, in which Moore's own experience 
as a propagandist of religion would be in- 
valuable, laid hold of him and, as an artist 
conscientious about details, he felt he must 
go to Palestine as he went to Ireland for 
local colour. No doubt not a scrap of 
adventure there will be wasted and we will 
get it all in some future tale. But he has 
told the story of his wanderings to his 
friends so fully, that they have got all 
the publicity of rumour and we can set 
some of them down. At Marseilles Mr. 
Moore embarked on the bluest of blue seas. 
" With Marseilles," he says, " my quest 
really began. When I looked on those 
white shores rising behind me out of the 
blue water into the twilight, the precipitous 
chalk worn and corroded by the wind into 
battlements and parapets and towers, re- 
minding the beholder of Valhallas builded 
by gods that have been— a beautiful phrase 

123 



GEORGE MOORE 



of William Morris. Those phantasmal 
ghostly shores rising steeply out of the wave 
with not a blade of grass enchanted me all 
through the lingering twilight until they 
faded as the vessel passed out of the bay, 
and suddenly I realised where I was and 
whither we were hastening, and I thought, 
* I'm afloat for the first time on the Mediter- 
ranean, that sea, around whose shores all 
the old stories sprang up like flowers.' " 

Mr. Moore was so enchanted by antique 
names and classical memories that he raved 
around the ship to callous fellow passengers. 
Here was Sicily, where the naughtiest idylls 
of Theocritus evoked memories he would 
willingly have discussed with his shrinking 
companions. In the lands about this inland 
sea were born the old gods and especially 
the goddesses, Venus foam bright rising from 
the waves and floating shorewards in her 
shell, Europa and the Bull, Proserpine 
gathering daffodils on the plains of Enna — 
on all these legends he dilated. But, alas, 
his intoxication with classical myth fell flat 
on companions who desired intoxication 
with whiskey and soda, and were more 
interested in a volcano in eruption than in 
George Moore in eruption. Only one fellow 
passenger, a silent, pleasant, middle-aged 
man, seemed to listen to Mr. Moore with 
interest. He did not talk much but kept 
the conversation going. Who he was, Mr. 

124 



GEORGE MOORE 



Moore did not know or care. He was a 
listener, and the art of picturesque conversa- 
tion did not rust for want of practice. At 
Port Said Mr. Moore had to ship for Joppa, 
and here he became aware of a sudden in- 
crease in respect for himself. He desired 
a cabin to himself, for the thought of being 
polite to a fellow passenger horrified him, 
but a cabin was a difficult thing to get ; yet 
when he appeared with his silent companion, 
he was treated as if he were an Emperor. 
All difficulties were smoothed away. Haroun 
Alraschid could hardly have passed amid 
more obsequious subjects than did George 
Moore, wondering at the way people ran 
to do him service. The East welcomed a 
Messiah from Ireland, what did it all mean ? 
He was enchanted if puzzled. He tells us 
that on the Joppa steamer suddenly looking 
into the hold he saw the East in all its sub- 
lime rags : turbans and burnouses, long 
skirts half silk, half cotton, in divers 
colours, sometimes yellow stripes sometimes 
blue, and always turbans, with veils floating 
down the back, and fastened with coils of black 
camel's hair rope round the head. The Syrian 
women are unveiled, the Mohammedans all in 
black. There were Jews and a rabbi, a 
great paunchy, bearded fellow with a nose 
like a flag, all thrown together like so many 
cattle and sheep, to sleep as best they could 
on their own rags, and there were plenty of 

125 



GEORGE MOORE 



these. Every moment a family would pull 
out a sack and drag out its hoard of rags, 
and then put them back for no reason a 
European could understand. The Bedouins 
seemed to him to bear the sadness of sun- 
light, for nothing, Mr. Moore thinks, is so 
sad as the sun, and the sun-sodden Bedouins 
seemed to him sadder than any Irish tinker 
he had ever seen. 

He was rowed ashore at Joppa in a great 
galley like a Roman barge, twelve-oared, 
two men to an oar, the rowers chanting 
their boat songs. He saw Joppa rising steep 
from the sea, house after house, stretching 
away east and west, beautiful in outline, 
like a strung bow, one minaret above all — 
an arrow pointing heavenwards. He stepped 
from the vessel into the straggling street, for 
there is no shore, and lo, a strange cry ! the 
symbol of the East appears, a camel, swinging 
great boxes of oranges tiered on either side, 
walking with a melancholy resignation sur- 
passing that of any saint's, long puritanical 
lips, callous tufted hide, the anchorite of 
the desert, the nonconformist of the four- 
footed world ! The donkeys were beautiful, 
well fed and would gallop ringing their 
bells — all unlike the Irish donkeys, sombre 
and obstinate, and only to be moved by a 
union of sticks and profanity. Here again 
the hotel melted in obsequiousness to George 
and his mysterious companion, and so it 

126 



GEORGE MOORE 



was all the way to Jerusalem. Moore was 
in search of a monastery where his Essene 
monks in " The Brook Kerith " could be 
housed and he wanted to ride on an Arab 
horse. He refused to ride on English ponies. 
Go to the East to ride on English ponies ! 
He must have an Arab horse. There were 
none, only the Arab draught horses, but 
still the magical influence prevailed. They 
would send to Damascus for an Arab steed 
for George ! Never before attended with 
such ready service, Moore commented on it 
to his companion, the middle-aged mystery 
who went with him to Jerusalem. " I do 
not know who you are," he said, " but they 
treat me as if I were a king." " My name 
is Frank Cook," said the mystery, mani- 
festing itself. Alas, it was not the splendour 
of George Moore's genius which made the 
East to bow itself before him, but the fact 
that his companion was the great Cook, 
the Adept who conjures tours out of the 
strange places of the earth, whose presence 
had caused all obstacles to melt. 

When Mr. Moore found that Damascus 
was a long way from Jerusalem and that 
he would have to wait a week for his Arab 
horse, he determined to ride anything he 
could get, and left the choice of horses to 
the dragoman. And here Nature who, in 
the words of Whistler, " is creeping up " 
to art, brought together for this new Don 

127 



GEORGE MOORE 



Quixote all the materials that had been used 
so successfully for the old. For the drago- 
man, a gaunt hungry-looking Arab, ap- 
peared next day mounted on a lean roan 
that would not, Mr. Moore says, have 
reminded him of Rosinante but that it was 
accompanied by a small bay pony ! Nature 
had brought all the players together, but 
she had juggled the parts, giving the drago- 
man Rosinante and casting George for the 
part of Sancho Panza. One sighs for the 
grotesque pencil of Gustave Dore to make a 
picture of such a party, to show the plump 
silhouette of Sancho on the little bay 
ambling along the peaks of Moab. Prob- 
ably Mr. Moore said to himself, " A Messiah 
dare not give any opportunities to the carica- 
turist ; public men, yes, emperors, yes, but 
Messiahs, never ! " So as he had cast him- 
self for the part of hero, he could not allow 
nature to divert him from his purpose and 
start him on the great errand of his life in 
such ignoble shape. He insisted on return- 
ing to the stables and exchanging the little 
bay pony for the gaunt Arab draught 
horse, that was to goose-step him relentlessly 
with military precision to the top of every 
mountain and the depth of every ravine 
between Jerusalem and Jericho, till each 
several bone in George's body shrieked for 
mercy. He got riding-breeches made of 
some terrible material such as people might 

128 



GEORGE MOORE 



make sails out of. Those terrible breeches, 
those wooden horses, the heat, the insects, 
the precipices he had to climb, fainting, 
searching along the Jordan and through 
Moab and by the Dead Sea for a monastery. 
His horse would not trot ; if it was beaten 
it kicked ; it would attempt the exploit of 
buck-jumping on the edge of precipices. It 
conquered its rider. At last after many 
monasteries, too unromantic for the pur- 
poses of the tale, were visited, on turning 
the shoulder of a mountain one was dis- 
covered perched half-way up a precipice over 
a valley and below was the Brook Kerith ! 
Moore is not an adept at climbing and he 
had been days in the saddle and was sore 
in every atom, but religion is a great power, 
and at last he climbed to his rock monastery. 
He subsided at last crying, " My God, my 
bones, my bones!" So tired was he that 
when he saw a woman there among the 
monks he did not even enquire what she 
was doing there. " You need say no more," 
said a witty woman who listened to George's 
account of his fatigues. "If you saw a 
woman in a monastery and did not enquire 
as to the cause of her presence there, you 
were indeed tired." There in some antique 
valley in the neighbourhood of Jericho is the 
monastery of the Essenes of the Brook 
Kerith. To placate the Abbot, George 
prayed for the second time in his life, or 
I 129 



GEORGE MOORE 



pretended to pray, in the rock cell where 
Elijah was fed by the ravens. We hear 
rumours of mountain climbing to which, I 
believe, " ^E," who has had experience of 
Mr. Moore's capacity as a mountaineer, 
listens with a sceptical ear, remembering 
that George Moore could not get a quarter 
of the way up Slieve Gullion, and he doubts 
in a hotter climate these ascents of precipices 
wild and gigantic as those in a Dore land- 
scape. " ^," I am told, suggests that Mr. 
Moore's dragoman or his draught horse 
carried him or pushed him through these 
wild adventures. As for the rest of the acts 
and adventures of this apostle, are they not 
written in "The Brook Kerith" ? 



130 



XVII 

'' The Brook Kerith " is the story of Jesus 
of Nazareth, whom Mr. Moore represents as 
a shepherd belonging to a brotherhood of 
Essenes living in a great settlement on the 
eastern bank of Jordan. Led by his medita- 
tions among the mountains where he fed 
his flock to believe that nothing should 
come between the soul and God, Jesus went 
to be baptised of John the Baptist and his 
baptism developed in him a fury of desire to 
save his people from the tyranny of the 
priests. This led him to Jerusalem. On the 
charge of threatening to destroy the Temple 
there, which was sustained by his actual 
eviction of the money-changers by physical 
force, and also of attempted blasphemy in 
equalling himself to God, he was, by priestly 
instigation, crucified by the Romans. Ap- 
parently dead, he was removed from the 
cross by his devoted friend Joseph of Arima- 
thsea, who placed him in his own new tomb. 
Jesus was not dead, and was restored to 
health by Esora, Joseph's ancient nurse. 
He is taken back by Joseph to the Brook 
Kerith, the monastery where his former 
brethren the Essenes had settled, and there 

131 



GEORGE MOORE 



he is restored to his task as shepherd of 
their flocks. Wandering again among the 
hills, he came to healing of his mind, shat- 
tered as it has been by his terrible experi- 
ences. After many years when Jesus was 
coming to himself, Paul the Apostle being 
persecuted by the Jews takes refuge at 
the Brook Kerith and is there confronted 
by Jesus, on the story of whose death and 
resurrection he had staked all his hopes and 
founded many Christian churches. Paul 
refuses to admit to his mind the truth of 
Jesus' story and leaves the monastery with 
Jesus as his guide to Caesarea. Paul wraps 
firmly round him his belief in his own 
Apostleship which had been conferred on 
him in vision from a Christ in heaven, and 
puts away from him as delusion the real 
Jesus and the teaching he would have given 
him. Jesus leaves Paul in safety near 
Caesarea, and we have a momentary passage 
across the stage of some Buddhist monks, 
when Jesus disappears from our view, while 
Paul pursues his journey to Csesarea and 
finally to Rome. 

The rumours that had reached us in 
Dublin of " The Brook Kerith," were many of 
them dispersed for me when I read the book 
itself. I was reminded for an instant — so 
do trivial matters arise uninvited in the 
mind during its most serious occupations — 
of those suggestions, to which I have referred 

132 



GEORGE MOORE 



before, made by Mr. Yeats to Mr. Moore 
when together they fashioned the play of 
" Dermiud and Grania." The first act, 
Mr. Yeats said, should be " horizontal." 
Mr. Moore was puzzled at that time by Mr. 
Yeats' geometrical language, but I think he 
must have since gone profoundly into this 
matter, for in " The Brook Kerith " we have 
a book that might be described as horizontal 
for the first 442 pages, rising suddenly then 
into one vertical peak and subsiding at 
page 466 to the horizontal again and con- 
tinuing at this level up to its close on page 
471. 

It is perhaps a tribute to Mr. Moore's 
power of transporting us to the East where 
he has laid the scenes of his story, that when 
one attempts to criticise " The Brook 
Kerith," one is led into a labyrinth of 
tropes and images that are more in the nature 
of eastern than of western literature. I 
might call " The Brook Kerith " a recital 
in a musical undertone such as those that 
beguiled " The Arabian Nights " ; the voice 
is never raised, the key never altered save 
in that moment when Paul talks noisily to 
Jesus on the road to Csesarea, and then the 
tones fall again into a murmur. I might 
say that the book represents a space of 
time filled with momentous happenings that 
yet fall silently as the sand in the hour-glass, 
and for all their meaning, there remains for 

133 



GEORGE MOORE 



us in the end but a little mound of sand. 
Mr. Moore has been at extraordinary pains 
to hush all sound in the book. " Down, 
down," he says to every fawning fancy that 
leaps up to his hand. " To heel, to heel," 
he says to any passionate emotion that 
threatens to overleap the bounds he set it. 
And perhaps he has done wisely. In at- 
tempting to retell the story of the Gospels 
he subjected himself to a tremendous ordeal, 
and that he has emerged from it with any 
credit at all, is a high tribute to his art as a 
writer. 

I remember that John Eglinton says in 
one of his essays that " no one could im- 
prove upon the story of David, unless, by 
a miracle, he could introduce some new and 
transforming element into his conception 
of it." He says that " when a great legend 
or narrative comes down to us from anti- 
quity — as, for instance, the Biblical story of 
David — it does so in a certain form in which 
it has spontaneously clothed itself and which 
fits it as the body fits the soul." The story 
of the Son of David had behind it more than 
a thousand years of marvelling worship be- 
fore our English translators wove it into the 
amazing literature we know to-day. He 
who would part such a garment undertakes 
a terrific task. His tale must inevitably 
seem to compete with the scripture story — 
that unequalled epic that begins with the 

134 



GEORGE MOORE 



Birth that is coincident with the birth of a 
new star in space, and that goes on, every 
line a phrase of music, to tell of Him who 
shall lead humanity, sickened with the bitter 
fruit of Eden, to the healing tree that springs 
up in the street of that Holy City that is 
built about the throne of God. Who shall 
worthily re-sing that song that note by 
note has sung itself into every event of life 
and death of centuries of English-speaking 
Christians, so that many of us hardly know 
now if it is the story, or the manner of its 
telling, that enchants us ? 

Mr. Moore brings upon his head also the 
reproach Plato put upon the poets who 
brought the gods into disrepute, making the 
heavenly story common, bringing the eso- 
teric teaching of the mysteries down to such 
materialistic tales as confront us to-day in 
the pages of the classical dictionary. 

One opens such a book as " The Brook 
Kerith " fearing that the morbus pediculosis 
that so often afflicts the realistic writer may 
leave its unclean trace on the spotless tale 
our Bible gave us. But Mr. Moore has been 
saved from this horrible ending to his literary 
career. It seems to me in reading the book, 
that instead of taking the story in his own 
hands and carrying it his own way, the story 
took him and carried him whither it would. 

Joseph of Arimathsea, whose life the 
Bible dismisses almost in a phrase, is the 

135 



GEORGE MOORE 



man whose spiritual struggle occupies the 
greater portion of " The Brook Kerith." 
If a book so still could be said to have any 
motion one might divide the tale into three 
movements. The Joseph movement, slow 
and languid, which merges into the more 
solemn movement of the Messiah's story, 
and the Pauline discord which twangs out 
noisily before the murmuring close. Joseph 
of Arimathsea's quest is Mr. Moore's own 
quest, and one must regret that one who 
has shown in this book, with an art few 
writers possess, the passionate desire for 
worship that starts the human heart on so 
many restless pilgrimages, should himself 
seem to be so satisfied that all his own 
quests shall end in the discovery of a happy 
phrase. This may be an unjust estimate of 
Mr. Moore, and it may seem absurd to bring 
a moral issue into a literary criticism, but 
I, in common with most women, can only 
separate the intellectual question from the 
moral one with extreme difficulty, nor can 
I follow Mr. Moore in his extraordinary 
preoccupation with what seems to me the 
mere scaffolding of life. I may be captured 
by the happy phrase, but I cannot rest in 
it with any lasting satisfaction. 

I cannot help being consumed with curi- 
osity to know if Mr. Moore altered the pur- 
pose of his book as he went on. I had 
divined a book almost entirely about St. 

136 



GEORGE MOORE 



Paul, and looked forward to a Mr. Moore 
who, having failed in works, should justify 
himself as St. Paul justified himself, by 
faith. But instead of this rugged, hearty 
optimist as principal hero I find the lov- 
able, delicate, sceptically-minded Joseph of 
Arimathsea who drew his Messiah rather out 
of his own warm heart than out of any 
profound intellectual adventure. The story 
leads one with wonderful skill through 
Joseph's many searchings after a prophet 
to his meeting with the Galilean Essene. 
After the crucifixion and disillusionment of 
Jesus, the prop that Joseph gave the story 
is cunningly withdrawn, and the way is 
prepared by the account of Jesus' absorption 
in the daily common task of shepherd on 
the hills for the complete self-realisation 
that came to him with the dramatic entrance 
of Paul. Paul's occupation of the stage is 
somewhat violent, but his time there is 
brief if noisy, and the book dies away in 
silence with his arrival at Rome. I had 
imagined a development of the character of 
Paul. But Paul's character has no develop- 
ment. It springs on the page fully armed, 
and remains there mail-clad and unchanging. 
The curtain goes down on Paul's iron-bound 
mind. 

Mr. Moore has chosen an extraordinary 
theme, and that he has been able to raise the 
disillusioned, broken prophet into a being 

137 



GEORGE MOORE 



more nearly divine than he who was crucified 
because he claimed divinity, we must admit 
to be a great achievement, if we are content 
to waive the question — a literary as well as 
a moral question — whether any writer is 
justified in breaking up the mould of such 
a story as the Gospel story. 

He has given us more than the ravelled 
thread such an attempt might produce. 
He has given us an absorbing study in a 
rare psychology, as well as a complete 
realisation of a land of milk and honey, of 
deserts and ravines and lakes, fierce and 
tender, forbidding, stern and bountiful, a 
land that could produce a truculent anthro- 
pomorphic deity made in the image of its 
own inhabitants, and yet gave humanity 
the Divine Shepherd of the Psalms and the 
compassionate and gracious figure that has 
allured Christendom for 2000 years. 

Mr. Moore has put some of his best writing 
into " The Brook Kerith." There are beauti- 
ful passages that describe Joseph and Azariah 
roaming in the woods about Arimathaea. 
The silence of the forest, "if silence it could 
be called, for when they listened the silence 
was full of sound, innumerable little sounds, 
some of which they recognised ; but it was 
not the hum of insects, or the chirp of a 
bird, or the snapping of a rotten twig that 
filled Joseph with awe, but something that 
he could neither see nor hear nor smell nor 

138 



GEORGE MOORE 



touch. The Hfe of trees — is that it ? he 
asked himself. A remote and mysterious 
hfe was certainly breathing about him and he 
regretted he was without a sense to appre- 
hend this life." 

The meeting between Jesus and Joseph 
by the Lake of Galilee is related as follows : — 

" Joseph could re-see the plain covered 
with beautiful grasses and flowers, with low 
flowering bushes waving over dusky head- 
lands, for it was dark when they crossed the 
plain ; and they had heard rather than seen 
the rushing stream, bubbling out of the 
earth making music in the still night. He 
knew the stream from early childhood, but 
he had never really known it until he stood 
with Jesus under the stars by the narrow 
pathway cut in the shoulder of the hill, 
whither the way leads to Capernaum, for 
it was there that Jesus took his hands and 
said the words ' Our Father which is in 
Heaven.' At these words their eyes were 
raised to the skies, and Jesus said : Whoever 
admires the stars and the flowers finds God 
in his heart and sees him in his neighbours' 
face. And ... he recalled the moment that 
Jesus turned from him abruptly and passed 
into the shadow of the hillside that fell 
across the flowering mead. He heard his 
footsteps and had listened, repressing the 
passionate desire to follow him and to say : 
Having found thee, I can leave thee never 

139 



GEORGE MOORE 



again . . . through the myrtle bushes he 
could hear the streams singing their way 
down to the lake, and when he came to the 
lake's edge he heard the warble that came 
into his ear when he was a little child, which 
it retained always. He heard it in Egypt 
under the pyramids, and the cataracts of 
the Nile were not able to silence it in his 
ears." ..." One of those moments when 
the soul of man seems to break, to yearn 
for that original unity out of which some sad 
fate has cast it — a moment when the world 
seems to be one thing, not several things ; 
the stars and the stream, the colours afloat 
on the stream, the birds' song and the words 
of Jesus." 

I have made these quotations, though I 
do not care to make quotations, because 
they seem to me to convey some idea of the 
musical undertone in which the book is 
written. A great deal of it is in prose like 
the warbling water that Joseph heard. Yet 
beautiful as much of the book is, is not Mr. 
Moore in writing it like unto those rational- 
ising writers who broke up the mould of the 
old pagan beliefs of Greece and Rome, 
making indeed a literature but defrauding 
the world of deity ? He puts upon the God- 
head feet of clay, successor to those who in 
turn have resolved into a philosophic ration- 
alism every divine tale that blessed hu- 
manity. 

140 



GEORGE MOORE 



" The Brook Kerith " is an epilogue to a 
beautiful story written by a man tired of 
the theme, yet who cannot invent anything 
more beautiful than the story he wrecks. 
He has no faith in any new vision, nothing 
wherewith to build up a new spiritual 
romance to make the world breathless with 
fresh beauty. 



141 



XVIII 

I HAVE written in this book at some length 
of Mr. Moore as an Irishman because 
although he has lived the greater part of his 
life in England and France, during the years 
that he lived here his house in Ely Place 
was a centre in its way for the literary folk 
in Dublin and his influence is of some account. 
There has always been a certain sterility in 
Irish ideals ; we reach for a star or we 
scramble lower down for a terrestrial bauble. 
In all their aims high and low Irishmen 
have a tragical alienation from life. They 
became peasant proprietors more because 
their fields were symbolic of the four fields 
of Kathleen ni Houlihan than because they 
might be sown and harvested and produce 
the food of man. They value their municipal 
privileges more for the sense of power these 
confer than from any serious intention of 
using these powers for simple human needs 
and comforts. Their political power has 
been treated as a game as diverting as 
musical chairs at a children's party, sitting, 
acting and voting to meaningless party tunes 
played at hazard and stopped at hazard. 
If this were not so, would we have our land 

142 



GEORGE MOORE 



in grass, our towns and cities in slums, 
and our country without a human hope to 
break down the barriers that our several 
quests have imposed upon us ? 

Mr. Moore as a man of feeling was no 
doubt moved by this sterility in Irish ideals, 
and he attempted almost brutally to intro- 
duce a personal and human ideal in Irish 
literature. His literary theories might in 
time have justified themselves here, had he 
not been deflected by his own excessive 
egoism from any serious attempt on the 
heart of Ireland. Where he proved himself 
stupid was in assuming, in his attempt to 
carry his literary theories into practice, 
that the life to be expressed here in literature 
was of the same quality as the life to be 
expressed in other countries. Humanity in 
Ireland has never become self-conscious. We 
are intensely conscious of our nationalism, 
of our imperialism, our religion. Catholic 
and Protestant, but beyond these we are 
the least introspective race in Europe. Mr. 
Moore's art is self-conscious and introspec- 
tive, a very complete expression of the 
humanity to which he was most accustomed. 
His art went all astray in Ireland. He sup- 
posed in us a feverish interest in sex. Ire- 
land regards sex, when she regards it at all, 
with an entirely primitive and practical eye. 
Love in Mr. Moore's use of the word she 
would consider balderdash. She is approach- 

143 



GEORGE MOORE 



able to the literary explorer on the side of 
the affections. Friendship and affection 
are extremely strong here, but they are not 
self-conscious. Mr. Moore, whose nature, as 
I have said elsewhere, fits him much more 
to write of affection than of passion, might, 
had he been patient, truly have served 
Irish literature and affected Irish life. His 
impatience and perverseness hindered him. 
This aspect of Irish life has never had an 
interpreter worthy of it, and Mr. Moore 
might have been that interpreter. I think 
we want an interpreter, and that perhaps 
the time has come for one, though it is 
difficult for one to realise this who has seen 
an Ireland grow more and more obsessed 
by the cinema and the penny novelette. The 
impossible cracksman of the one and the 
impossible duke of the other are both as 
far away from life as any legend of Saint 
or Sidhe. We are in a sorry plight, whom a 
foolish system of education has robbed of 
those bardic heroes who should have been 
the natural exemplars of our youth. What 
room was there in our school primers for the 
extravagant Gaelic heart ? Our intellects 
were not bred true to type and we have a 
mongrel taste. He was a wise man, that 
Danish bishop Grundtvig, who reared his 
High School pupils on their native hero tales. 
The ordered social life of rural Denmark is 
the result of that inspiration. Still I cannot 

144 



GEORGE MOORE 



imagine Mr. Moore as the novelist of the 
Red Branch or the Fianna. 

I write this last chapter of my book in a 
city that has been shattered by the big guns 
of modern warfare. It is a heavy ending 
for a book begun with a light heart. With 
every twenty-five years of Irish life we 
expect a tragedy, with every fifty years it 
inevitably comes. Can any ruling country 
afford to neglect such portents ? Can it be 
stupid enough to imagine that a nation 
whose belief in its own high destiny is so 
profound that seven hundred years of Eng- 
lish domination have failed to obliterate it, 
will ever lose that hope ? One hundred and 
eighteen years have passed since the last 
passionate outburst of that hope, and the 
revolution of 1916 is but begun. The spirit 
that inspired it is no less fervent than it was 
then, and is as widely spread in Ireland, 
for all the protests of our members at West- 
minster. It may be a town movement now 
and in alliance with a hungry labour, as it 
was a country movement then and in 
alliance with a hungry tenantry. It is the 
same movement, it possesses hearts as brave 
and martyrs as willing. One portion of 
Ireland expresses its desire for freedom of 
government by constitutional methods and 
by taking arms to serve England, one by 
taking arms against England. This desire 
K 145 



GEORGE MOORE 



should appeal to a people like the English 
who were wont to love freedom themselves 
and who fought for it so bravely against 
their kings and nobles ; who wrung from 
them by insurrection and by civil wars the 
charters of their constitution. What English- 
man but thinks with pride of how the town 
of York held all England at bay and let its 
king batter vainly at its gates, till he had 
yielded it the charter of its civic rights ? 
Are we to have no charters in Ireland but 
dishonoured charters, no treaties but broken 
treaties ? Yet I would be just to England. 
She is surely in a desperate strait, when 
within her own borders she is compelled to 
treat as a " scrap of paper " the most cher- 
ished charter of her people's liberties, the 
Habeas Corpus Act. That she should sus- 
pend it here is natural enough, angered as 
she was at our disaffection and at the timing 
of our revolution. That she suspended it 
at home is a bad omen in a country which 
has grown great through its passion for in- 
dividual liberty. 

It may seem to my readers as if I had 
shoved Mr. Moore aside in the preceding 
paragraphs. Surely, they may say, I did 
not dream that there was any part in our 
recent tragedy that Mr. Moore might have 
been cast for. I have not done with Mr. 
Moore at all, though it was no part of my 
plan in this book to arraign him or any 

146 



GEORGE MOORE 



absenting Irishman at the bar of his country 
and ask him to show cause why he has not 
devoted such gifts as were his to her service. 
That would be an absurd position for me to 
assume ; Mr. Moore at the helm in Dublin 
during such a storm as has broken here 
would be an absurd spectacle. Yet it 
should not be unnatural for an Irishman to 
be seen in the service of his country. Mr. 
Edward Martyn, who has never been a 
sentimentalist about Ireland, and who has 
indeed given her many shrewd knocks, has 
believed himself to have a duty towards 
the country whence he draws his income 
and has fulfilled that duty. Sir Horace 
Plunkett has acknowledged the same obli- 
gation; so too has " iE." 

Had Mr. Moore any gifts that he might 
have given to Ireland ? I believe his frank- 
ness might have been of great benefit to 
our public life, and his intense concern with 
human life and emotion might have im- 
parted a warmth to our literature that is 
missing from it now. The spirit and the 
flesh are very far apart in Ireland. So un- 
natural a distance is between them that the 
conquest of the material by the spiritual, 
which is, I suppose, the end of all religion, 
promises to be a long and tedious process 
here. I remember the sufferings inflicted 
on Mr. Edward Martyn by the earthliness 
of the feminine soprano in Church music 

147 



GEORGE MOORE 



and how he fought for the aloofness of the 
boyish treble. He won too, but I think he 
had done better had he waited for the aloof- 
ness of Palestrina to capture the feminine 
soprano. The separation of the spirit and 
the flesh, the churches tell us of, will surely 
be done much more efficiently hereafter 
than we can do it now. The purpose of our 
existence here is more properly to bring 
heaven to earth. Yet Mr. Moore would surely 
be a most inappropriate prophet of such a 
creed. Heaven may have cast him for this 
end, but the rival establishment intervened. 
I often wonder what effect upon our 
normal constitution here in Ireland had all 
the movement of that febrile time that we 
call the Irish literary revival. Has any 
intellectuality at all emerged out of it, any 
public opinion, any essentially national flavour 
in our life ? True, some of our educational 
establishments are aware now of what was 
then unknown to them, that in Mr. Yeats 
and " iE " we have poets of whom any 
nation should be proud. It can hardly 
happen now as in those days when one 
Alexandra College student whispered to 
another that she had heard by way of a 
French review that there was a literary 
movement in Ireland. Yet our public life 
in Ireland is as barren of thinking as it ever 
was and there is no true cohesion amongst 
us, though there are many enforced unities. 

148 



GEORGE MOORE 



There has been no lack of courage in Ire- 
land ; there never is, but even our courage 
has a fatal quality. Mr. Moore has a moral 
courage that he has developed to the point 
where it becomes immorality, as most of 
his friends realised when they read his " Ave, 
Salve and Vale." He was content to rear 
his monument in the Trilogy, and though 
one may regret that he has not a nobler 
ambition, it is in a sense an achievement. 
A century hence people will search in it as 
eagerly as they search in Hogg and Trelawney 
for memories of Shelley and Byron. Mr. 
Yeats and his literary contemporaries in 
Ireland may have a more kindly, but they 
never will have a more brilliant, chronicler. 
Literary history must accord Mr. Moore a 
place amongst the most brilliant and varied 
writers of our time. Still, he will be remem- 
bered less by the creations of his imagina- 
tion than for his malicious and witty account 
of his contemporaries. 

In the " Memoirs of My Dead Life," he 
wished that his body after death might be 
cremated and the ashes enclosed in a Greek 
vase, with dancing fauns and nymphs 
modelled around its curves, but it would be 
far more appropriate to place round the vase 
which holds his ashes the figures of the Irish 
literary revival, with George Moore as Pan 
playing on his pipes the movement of their 
dance. 

149 



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